


How Close He Was to the Golden Crown

by Alexharrier



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Addiction, Blood and Injury, Brain Injury, Depression, Drug Withdrawal, Forgive Me, Gen, I promise it's about recovery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Temporary Amnesia, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, stages of grief
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:21:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27477955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexharrier/pseuds/Alexharrier
Summary: HI I AM PERSONALLY HERE TO KICK EVERYONE IN THE TEETHBut also me in front of my conspiracy board: we don't know how much time actually passes between episode 17 and 18, and while it's kind of assumed that Epsilon self destructs immediately, the fact that we know North says "this time" about Wash waking up and that Epsilon is pictured in sidewinder also suggests that it wasn't the first time. Also, I still think though that would be traumatic, it doesn't completely explain Wash's reaction that a boundary was crossed, when he refuses to work with any AI ever again. In this essay I will beat this poor man with a shovel and watch as he puts himself back together again. I don't necessarily consider this a rewrite so much as a filling the blanks on Wash's early emotional heel face turns in seasons 6-10.Alpha Church: So, you’ve got kinda a lot of stuff going on in here. Wanna talk about it?Wash: no.Will probably update weekly for a little while! I'm doing nano lol. after that, I mean, let's just enjoy the ride.
Relationships: AI Program Epsilon | Leonard Church & Agent Washington, Agent Carolina & Agent Washington (Red vs. Blue), Agent North Dakota & Agent Washington (Red vs. Blue), Agent Washington & Agent York (Red vs. Blue)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 32





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> We go hard and fast into this so mind the rating and tags.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “That fragment became epsilon. And I was just unlucky enough to have it assigned to me.” 
> 
> “So you knew. You knew from the very beginning what was going on.”
> 
> “Mostly.”

In the period of the second technological revolution humanity experienced an expansive surge in consumerism. This affected nearly everything, from how many b hollywood sequels there could be, to the wanton destruction of the world that people lived on. During that time, conservationists naively tried to save as many wild animal species as they could, not knowing that in just over a hundred years space travel would enable humanity new frontiers to exploit.

One of these species was the cheetah. It was said to be the fastest land mammal to ever have lived on earth.

Because of its specialization the species faced a lot of acute threats related to its abilities. Cheetahs were incredible for their speed, no land animal could match it in a sprint, and they enjoyed prey that other predators would have to be lucky to land. But because it was only good at running, the blunt cleat like claws it had were no good for fighting, and the supple springform spine it had was delicate, and broke easily. Other predators which had more athletic range competed for the cheetah’s resources, and as populations dwindled and separated from each other, genetic variance suffered, until ultimately, the only cheetahs left were pets and attractions.

In the last ditch efforts to try and restart the population, cheetah keepers would foster cheetahs to and with dogs. You see, cheetahs occupied such a precarious place in the world they inherited genetic anxiety, the kind that says not to turn your back, not to stop running because even if you catch a dinner today, you might not tomorrow, and you might be caught by something bigger than you in ten minutes. Dogs were domesticated out of their flight instincts, and so they were a surprising, yet perfect companion for the last living wonders of the cat family.

Wash is the dog in his team and he knows it. His stats are not particularly significant to his peers in any area, yet superiors elevated and recommended him again and again because of the effect he had on the team. Maine bested him and everyone in strength and stamina but couldn’t put a sentence together without a lot of patient encouragement, CT was paranoid on a good day but somehow when Wash was around she was less likely to deviate from missions, and Carolina. Well. There’s a reason the cheetah analogy works too well and it isn’t just because her enhancement is speed.

So what happens, he wonders, rubbing his sore wrist against the medbay bed’s restraints. The restraints which were added the third time he ripped out the iv, because the first two times were just flukes, surely.

What happens to the cheetahs, when the dog gets anxiety?

The first insertion was obviously the worst. Because the procedure was essentially an application of biological and artificial brain surgery, the patients must be conscious so that the medical team can monitor the active chemistry of the pairing. Whatever anyone tried to describe to Wash, the actual experience was so much worse.

He was expecting someone like Delta, or maybe Theta, a little computer dude who’d introduce himself with an odd quirk and maybe also a headache. What do you say when you meet someone in your head? Is it more like a job interview or a first date? Do you ask them about how they’re feeling or do you prepare a list of rapid fire answers and expect to be measured with some unseen judgement? Being a seasoned soldier you’d think he’d be adaptive to either outcome, but somehow he can still tell he’s sweating on the operating table.

He was also assured that it would be painless, at least, comparatively to a gsw which probably isn’t saying much. Carolina finished her turnaround while he watched. She didn’t even bat an eyelash, but then she never does, takes pain like she takes a compliment, with grit teeth and a look of determination. So he could expect a sting of some sort, surely.

Insertions are done in zero grav, so Wash shouldn’t be surprised when the OR goes all deep space and the operating table drops away like he’s a ship cut free from its mooring, and yet his stomach flips all the same. It’s a simple order to hold still as the doctors perform the operation, and he tries not to think about how they’re essentially just plugging a glorified zip drive directly into his brain. Or how if he sneezed right now he might be eating through a tube for the rest of his life.

Then there’s a distinct click, as the artificial drive locks into place. And all hell breaks loose.

Wash flinches forward down out of the surgeon’s reach, curled into a ball against the head splitting pain radiating from the base of his implant. He waits for it to end but it doesn’t. If anything the white hot stream of information can tell where it is and gets madder. Which is what it is isn’t it? Pure emotional data wired straight into his amygdala, which is now being treated to rolling punches akin to a speed bag. Rational thought kinda stops being a thing under that kind of duress.

Someone is screaming. Distantly the thought occurs to Wash that it might be himself.

Recall starts getting a little patchy, and this is what makes him scared. At some point one of the technicians thought to re-engage the grav-sim, but Wash doesn’t remember hitting the floor. Waves of crushing grief take the helm of consciousness, adding to the physical mix of disorientation as Wash finds it hard to breathe much less understand why

“Leonard c’mon stop it,” he remembers. Remembers how he held on to her wrist and she let him and they pretended like it wasn’t forever, like she would be home tomorrow. Remembers the look on her face like it was pity, like it was an apology, like it was love.“You’re going to make me late.”

Someone is grabbing his arms, trying to push and pull him in different directions. Wash fights back on instinct, Leonard grits his teeth. How could they do this to him, the rage in his head says, and his vision whites out with the pain.

This is wrong. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. It wasn’t supposed to hurt, not like this, _She wasn’t supposed to go, she couldn’t be gone, this shouldn’t be all that’s left WHAT DID THEY DO TO HIM_

Make it stop, Wash opens his eyes, streaming tears, Make it stop, Leonard thinks, taking control of his hands and feet, whatever I have to do, Make it stop. He grabs the nearest scalpel and aims for his chest.

“Someone get a handle on that sedation!”

“Fifty milileters of ketamine, going in,”

“Hold him down!”

Things slow down, He stops fighting against the knee to his back, and they peel him off the floor. There’s pressure around his chest followed by stinging and then numbness. It doesn’t feel real, the way his head swims around the room and he sees her face on the back of his eyelids. The drugs make it impossible to keep his fire hot, and so he sinks low, low into sadness. Mourning doesn’t even begin to cover the weight in his chest, or the pressure in his head. Everything that he used to know, used to be, would never be the same again.

“Get him to recovery! Counselor I’d like to speak with him as soon as he wakes up.”

“Of course sir. What was that he said about goodbyes? Director?”

He dreams. He dreams about hot monsoon wind and thunder, dry sagebrush and dirt in his teeth, running underneath the magnolias and the smell of russian olives on the river. He dreams of a woman whose face he could never forget but who he’s never met, and who somehow he loves more than anything in the world. He dreams of loneliness after his father died, and how his mother cried when he enlisted. He dreams about his team and their missions and how he’d been filled with anger after his discharge. Time distorts between the seams of who he is, and who he was, or wasn’t.

When he pulls himself out of the scattered wreckage of his mind Wash notices first that he is alone in his head. This is immediately a relief, and an unsettling disappointment. It didn’t work, he thinks, but can’t decide if he’s referring to the insertion or the attempted act of violence.

“He’s coming to. Would you please retrieve the director?”

The Director. One of the pieces that was balancing precariously in his wreckage tumbles off it’s edge. Wash realizes that the next few minutes are critical to how the rest of things will play out. If only he had a chance to recover first, but then, he thinks with morbidity at the number of targets they’ve burned to the ground, recovery isn’t much of the Director’s style.

“Counselor,” Wash says, opening his eyes, but then quickly changes his mind with a squint against the light.

“Agent Washington,” The counselor says, “How are you feeling?” The record starts here.

“Better,” comparatively. Wash sits up and chooses his words. “How long was I out?”

“It’s been about six hours. Would you say your headache has subdued?”

“You could say that,” He tries to keep his eyes open and find the counselor across the room. Play the part.

“Are you --” the counselor is cut off as a technician enters the room, the Director in tow.

“Agent Washington,” The director stands at attention at the foot of his bed, stern eyes searching for the questions he’s afraid to ask.

“Sir,” Wash nods in silent salute, iv preventing a more formal gesture. He straightens ready for instruction nonetheless.

“It’s good to see you alert. You gave us quite the scare soldier. Thought I was going to lose a surgeon there for a second, and I’m afraid we’re a few weeks away from a replacement,” The Director says, crows feet crinkled in feigned humor, untouched by the ice in his southern accent.

“I apologize for the conduct sir. It was a momentary lapse in control,” Wash says, owning his mistakes. “I’m ready for another insertion attempt.”

“That won’t be necessary. We’ll be pulling the Epsilon unit for decommission, and though your service has been valuable--”

“Has been?” Wash cuts him off in a rush of dread. They both know how the rhetoric of this conversation goes. It echoes around in Wash’s skull, a different accent, devastation that’s not his own. It leaves a lingering taste of metal and dissociation in his mouth and head.

“Director,” Counselor Price stands, adjusts his clipboard. “Perhaps it might be prudent to conduct Agent Washington’s evaluation prior to any decisions,” he says, and Wash recognizes the subversion of a lawsuit when he sees one.

“Conduct your evaluation then, I’ll have the letter sent to our Agent’s reassignment,” The Director says, unchanged.

“Sir, If I may,” Wash speaks up. It’s now or never, he hope’s the Director’s favor of boldness forgives the desperation. “You know more than anyone how important this program is. Every unit is crucial. Give me a second chance, I can get Epsilon online, I know it. You need me,” Wash says, if only it were true.

The Director holds his gaze with a level of scrutiny Wash doesn’t usually crave. In actuality Wash knows by the discarded thoughts left inside his head like the radioactive debris after a fallout that even the possibility of contamination from Epsilon makes him a liability at best, and a loose end to tie off at worst. He’s seen the Director fill ‘reassignments’ to dead ends for agents for much more minor offenses. If Wash is reassigned he won’t live out the tour. Which is why he chooses to appeal to the mission’s objective, the Director’s greatest strength and weakness lie in his ideals, things that, to be more convincing, Wash could kick himself for not exhibiting ambition for earlier.

He waits hanging on the Director's attention, expecting the worst when the Director softens, pinches the bridge of his nose. “Very well. Give him his evaluation and then we’ll schedule a second insertion,” He turns once again to Wash, this time posture full of threat. “Do not fail me soldier.”

Wash unclenches his jaw. “I won’t let you down sir.”

Round two goes very differently.

For one thing, Wash is no longer worried about making a good impression with his sense of humor, and more concerned with conversing at all.  
Little does he know Epsilon is also prepared.

_YOU._

_FUCK._

_GODDAMNNIT._

The unmitigated rage and revulsion catch like bile in Wash’s throat, salivary glands stimulated by the rush of emotion. Wash tries not to worry whether it’s his or not.

_Listen closely Epsilon, your future depends on it._

_Don’t! Fucking call me that._

Wash recoils slightly from the lack of protocol, every other AI unit he’d met practically lived and breathed their designation. He closes his eyes as the surgeons wrap up the insertion procedure, and focuses inside.

_Alright. You and I need to get along, our lives depend on it._

_Our lives? I think you and I remember what happened last time very differently. Only one of us is vulnerable to knives to the chest._

_Maybe, but if this insertion fails you’ll be terminated. Something about how much you fought for control last time, or I don’t know, the overwhelming feelings of revenge suggest you’d rather that not happen._

There’s a pause, an internal check, a violation of privacy as Epsilon rifles through the last twenty four hours from Wash’s perspective. The unit triggers an incredulous burst of dopamine, and Wash has to fight the urge to laugh as they lay him back down on the operating table. By the time gravity has reengaged however, the feeling has soured.

_Buddy, at this point I welcome decommission._

_You’re not serious._

_Does it sound like I’m joking?_

Wash attempts to keep the frustration off his face as the technicians test his visual acuity.

_I suppose not. Though you seem better now that some time has passed, I have to admit my plan for convincing you didn’t get much farther than forming sentences, and maybe saying pretty please?_

_Time means nothing to someone like me,_ the Epsilon unit thinks, and Wash sways as the tidal wave of grief threatens to swallow them both. The technician pauses with concern but Wash holds up a hand to placate the team. He’s ready this time.

_Stay with me, focus on the moment Ep--Leonard._ Wash searches through the detritus left behind by their last encounter, for the pieces of the man Epsilon used to be. _Should I call you Leonard? Or is Church better?_

The question does it’s job, and the world around them settles along with Wash’s vertigo.

_Church. Call me church._

_Church then. I hope you’ll appreciate I’m doing my best here, most the other units aren’t_

People. He doesn’t communicate. Doesn’t dare provoke that particular wrath sitting at the base of his brainstem. They aren’t people anymore. No, that's still bad.

_Aren’t what? An amalgamation of all the memories that tore us all apart?_

Jesus that’s even worse. Wash is beginning to feel more like a bomb squad recruit where the bomb is mouthy and has a quagmire of emotional trauma.

_So… Unique._

_Wow. I’m Flattered. You going to tell me I have a sweet spirit next?_

_My point is you’re valuable, and you have more than enough reason to be motivated as an asset and live out your function._

_Oh really? How do you figure, smartass?_

Wash stands and follows the directions the technicians give him for strength tests and coordination. He waffles on tactics, but decides to double down on Church’s (all of them, apparently), tendency toward moral motivation.

_I know you care about her more than anything. If you really want to make her sacrifice mean something you’d at least perform until you got a chance to end this program, take back what was yours, or both._

Before the thought even finishes Wash can tell it was a mistake. Anger radiates with heat at the base of his neck, and he stiffens against the technician’s grip.

_How fucking dare you. What could you POSSIBLY know about sacrifice!_

Wash’s knees buckle, but this time he doesn’t kiss the floor. Instead he hangs in one of the technician’s arms as the room blurs. It’s all he can do to remain present, the battle in his head taking full precedence.

Epsilon doesn’t seem to have the same problem, plows right along regardless of the world around them. _I’ll speak slowly so you get it, you seem kinda dumb. You don’t get to decide how I honor her memory. There’s nothing left for me, I’m literally a fragment of who I was, so every millisecond I spend conscious, which being an AI I can tell you is all the time, is torture. You actually interrupted me in the middle of a really good memory just to remind me how much of a fucking failure I am so, thanks for that!_

Wash is on the floor again, frozen by the onslaught of hatred so hot it could split his skull open. He can tell the doctors are scrambling around him, knows that they’re keeping him restrained, but this time he manages not to resist. Can’t seem to fight off the aphasia though, external or otherwise.

Epsilon’s words echo in his head. _The only thing I want is to be done. I want to go over the fucking rainbow bridge already. And if I have to go through you to do that, then so be it._

Wash can feel the surgeon working at the base of his skull to get the implant out, suddenly rallies and jerks away from his grip. He tries to look up at the medical staff, but can’t quite manage eye contact with anyone. “No,” he groans through grit teeth, “Don’t.”

“Do not pull the AI Unit,” A distinct voice says from somewhere in the room, the Director. “Agent Washington has made his choice, let him see it through.”

There’s a pause from the staff, and then their attention changes focus. “We’ll give him another round of sedative. Cue up the Ketamine,” Wash hears the surgeon say, and he relaxes back into the floor. When the drugs hit he welcomes the crushing wave of exhaustion, and the nothing that comes with it.

The next few days are. Well they’re not great. Wash assumes it’s only a couple of days, the periods of time he’s able to hang on to consciousness aren’t long, and in general are laborious. The drugs get stronger, which he is both grateful and resentful for.

Epsilon functions independently of his sleep cycles, so to what degree the AI is available or interested in conversing when Wash is able varies. For the most part it seems Wash is at the mercy of the slideshow of memories behind his eyes, which continues whether he’s awake or not.

He doesn’t get visitors, either, which is upsetting at first, until he tries to talk to the technician. It takes several minutes of her listening to him and writing on his chart without response, when he finally loses his patience.

“HEY. YOU. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”

She startles at Wash’s volume, looks up as if she’s seeing him for the first time and says “Are you talking to me?”

“Yes! Who else would I be talking to?” He says.

She stammers. “Well, I. You. You mostly talk to yourself.”

They both stare at each other for a moment while Wash tries to process that in a way that makes sense. “Oh,” is all he can come up with. He tries to rub the exhaustion from his eyes but the IV and heart rate monitors have him tethered. Can’t help the bitterness that builds in his chest. Or the fear of what he may have let slip while incoherent. Epsilon is listening, but is doing what Wash would describe is the equivalent of laying on the ground and staring at the ceiling.

She seems to pick up on his distress, and searches the fields on his chart. “But I can make a note that you talked to me. Right here. There you go,” she looks back up. “What do you want to talk about?”

Wash looks around. The room is spartan, and in spite of how empty it feels he can’t help a little quirk of a smile at the pun. Tries to think of a topic through the fog but finds it too hard. Instead he settles for the most pressing feeling instead. He licks his dry lips and says, “Can I have a juice.”

“Oh,” she says, mild surprise. “Yes. I’ll run to the mess hall and get you one, hang tight,”

“I’ll be here,” Wash says, with an apologetic shrug of the shoulders.

They won’t let him have visitors if he’s rehearsing the Director’s memories like it’s a roast and Wash has a veritable brain copy of his diary. Though, the sheer fact he hasn’t been eliminated as a factor completely yet doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if that’s the case. It’s difficult to reason though with the headache he’s got, and if he’s totally honest, the overflow depression makes it hard to care enough to try.

 _Are you ready to give up yet,_ Epsilon chips in.

 _Not in the slightest._ Wash tries to put up a front of emotional bravado, knows that it’s transparent as glass. _What other choice do I have._

_We could go together. Make it a fuck off forever party, attendance of two. Ain't nobody can kill you for government secrets if you’re dead._

_No thanks._ So much for hoping the break in wallowing was a good sign. The sudden focus from the AI is starting to feel like less of a reprieve and more of a warning. He tries to change the subject. _I’m excited to drink my juice. Can’t drink juice if I’m dead._

_UGH. you can’t keep this up forever._

_I don’t know, maybe I will,_ Wash thinks, in a spurt of nihilism. _I can’t lie, my resilience even surprises me a little. Maybe we’ll still be doing this a year from now, do you think it’s safe to be on sedatives that long?_

_Shut up. I’ll just take control then and do it myself._

_That’s not possible,_ Wash thinks, snorts a scoff out loud.

 _No? I wonder if Agent Maine would agree with you,_ Epsilon fires back, with an equal amount of scorn.

The blood freezes in Wash’s veins.

_What._

Epsilon’s increase in activity prickles the hairs on his neck as he pulls up Wash’s memories of Maine. That day in the classroom, The battle over CT, Sigma had been so, Forward. But as time went on, in the halls and training and missions, Sigma was out and about less and less. _Oh come on, don’t tell me you didn’t notice. Sigma wears that man around like it’s his personal costume. Bet it drives him crazy not to talk, dude loves to hear himself speak._

 _You’re lying. That’s not possible._ Wash’s mind starts to race, goes through all the times he’d seen Maine, trying to remember evidence that it was the soldier and not the AI. The man talks so little it’s really hard to tell.

 _Well, the way I see it either I annoy you enough into taking the big leap, or I jesus-take-the-wheel you all the way back to heaven. Which would you prefer?_ Epsilon mentally shrugs.

 _Neither, thanks._ Frantically he tries to find a natural way to deviate Epsilon’s attention from death while he grips the railing on his bed. Can’t quite manage, ends up with a plea instead. _Why can’t there ever be a third option where everyone lives happily ever after?_

Epsilon recoils in offense. _Easy for you to say, technically I’m not even alive._ Then the misery hits again and Wash thinks about how loose they used to laugh after a shot of whiskey, how they used to one up each other until she won at whatever it was because of course she always did. Feels epsilon’s loss more than hears him say it, it opens wide inside him threatening to swallow them both.

 _I have to believe that there’s hope for both of us,_ Wash thinks, desperately trying to pull them out of the violent swing of despair, grasping at straws for some sort of stability.The fall back into something familiar makes him complacent, and he imagines the threat has passed. He tries for some consolation, _for what it’s worth, I’m sorry._

 _I don’t want your pity,_ Epsilon spits. His headache magnifies as his right arm twitches and then releases the railing of its own accord.

Wash’s stomach flips as he panics. _Stop!_ His hand grabs the tape holding the iv in place and rips it off. _NO!_ He grits his teeth and his muscles freeze up as they send conflicting messages to his limbs. _You can’t do this!_

 _OH YEAH? FUCKING WATCH ME._ His head feels like it’s breaking in two, the lights of the room cutting into his pain like knives, and Wash flinches back. Epsilon grabs the line of his iv and pulls it out.

Blood starts to drip down his arm like a warm feeling of melancholy. _You have to cover that to make it stop,_ Wash points out in frustration.

“Kinda don’t care,” Epsilon barks back using his voice, busy removing the rest of the medical equipment. When he sets his feet on the ground their head swims with vertigo, but to Wash’s dismay it doesn’t slow Epsilon down at all. He’s quickly rifling through all the drawers opening all the cupboards, growls through Wash’s throat when they’re all empty.

Wash feels momentary relief, but he can’t decide what he was expecting, for them to leave his rifle under the sink? That would be obviously stupid. _Looks like you’re out of luck,_ he thinks at Epsilon, smug.

Epsilon turns them around, looks at the bed. “Don’t feel so cocky,”He says, and grabs the plastic IV line, uncoils it from the hook. “I just need to think a little outside the box.”

It’s a simple matter to loop the cord over one of the ship's water pipes that runs along the ceiling. Wash doesn’t go easily, fights with everything he’s got but Epsilon has the keys and he’s not handing them back. They’re in the middle of looping the noose, hands shaking like a man with palsy when the technician opens the door.

“Okay Wash, they had orange and apple, which would you--” She cuts off at the sight of him standing on the physicians chair hair askew, blood dripping down his elbow, nearly finished noose in his hands. Epsilon freezes in surprise.

“My juice!” Wash says, with all the enthusiasm of an ‘I’m saved!’. Thank god for juice.

The tech drops the boxes and reaches around the wall to something in the hall. An alarm starts blaring, FILSS’s voice rings through the halls: Emergency, Code Silver, Room 302.

“Goddammit,” Epsilon winds the last part of the loop in Wash’s distraction, has it over their head as the response team floods the room.

They catch him when he kicks the stool away, hold him up even as they thrash and fight. Someone must fetch some scissors because they cut him down before his vision can go. They hit their head on a side table on the way down, their eye stings with sweat and blood from a cut above their eyebrow. Wash starts to cry in relief, Epsilon screams in frustration.

“What dosage was he on?”

“I don’t know it’s all on the floor--”

“We’ll have to put him on antipsychotics, someone get a dose of amytal”

The prick of an injection is quickly followed by cottony exhaustion, heavy and soft like a pillow to the face. Wash welcomes it as a reprieve, Epsilon hangs on regretful to release control, holding Wash awake with spite alone.

“Don’t think this is over,” He says into the tile, a whisper meant only for one.

 _I know it’s not_ , Wash thinks, thanks god that it’s not. And then he passes out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey if you want I have a writing playlist which cannibalized some old 8 tracks as well as picks of my own -- [ I'll keep adding to it as we get further into the story. ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5O3yNzR764cwFPxExEkd8J?si=0xHjnwdVRAa1DxUqZdS2pg)
> 
> My tumblr is here: [Waiting for Wings ](http://alexharrier.tumblr.com/)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You had, Difficulties, with your assigned AI unit"
> 
> "Difficulties! Yeah, I suppose that's a word."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little shorter than the first, I'm trying to keep them between 3k and 5k and this is on the smaller side. Grins from my nano bubble we got chapters to burn and a Wash to hurt lets GO

The day of her funeral was sunny. It was July. With the kind of heat that burns the scalp and leaves a trail of sweat through a suit coat. They put her to rest in her family’s plot in the Jacksonville cemetery, under the magnolias. 

There was no body to recover, lost behind enemy lines to the Covenant. Leonard still ordered a casket though, even though it was empty it felt right. It was better for her family, to bury something, a UNSC banner denoting her officer rank draped overtop. 

It made it final. 

He remembers squeezing a little hand and refusing to cry. 

  
  
  


The first test he passed with flying colors. Not a single problem, all variability and subroutines were accounted for, and the mission that was based on it was a complete success. He got to watch the live feed through Agent Carolina’s helmet cam himself, and he couldn’t have been more vicariously proud. They were finally making it happen.

He remembers the accomplishment in her voice too, when their team recovered the first artifact. Like a ripple from a stone thrown into clear water, she had an influence that was infectious. It was hard for him to know, separated from it all as he was, if she had been made for the job or if she finally was made for herself. 

  
  


Other things are not as linear. And make less sense. 

Clearing a 256 bit encryption key while the power is cutting in and out and the floor keeps rocking like a bucking bronco comes to mind.

So does the extremely reasonable and yet completely alien chittering that comes to him in dark moments. It’s both comforting and unsettling. The alien also tells decent jokes. 

But something is always missing afterward. 

  
  
  
  


First time Wash can accurately recall coming to it’s sharp, and with a cold sweat.

He tries to get a handle on his surroundings, panics when he can’t move his arms. It takes a couple jerks against the leather straps to realize what happened, and then he lays his head back and takes stock. Same room it seems like. He wishes it had a window, though he knows it’s impossible to tell what time it is by deep space. It would make him feel better anyway. 

The door is cracked, but nobody comes in, and Wash stays awake a long time. 

Epsilon doesn’t talk to him. Probably wouldn’t approve of the restraints either. 

He realizes at some point that he never got to drink that juice. Something inside him just shatters, and his pillow is still wet with unwiped tears by the time he falls asleep. 

  
  
  
  


“Wash, Get a load of this,” York calls him over, hiding a binder furtively under his arm. 

“If this is another one of your pinup calendar projects I don’t want to be implicated,” he says, but still follows him around a corner. York is gone, but the binder is there, open on the desk. 

He reads his own psyche eval from five years ago, when he was first selected for the program. It reminds him of the interview with Price where he dredged up his altercation in a base camp commode. He’s never seen this folder, or the papers in it, before.

He inexplicably snaps it shut, and hands it to an officer waiting beside his chair. “Take this to the personnel administrator, have him send letters to each of these selected soldiers.”

  
  
  
  
  


The wind whistles through his suit as he tucks his legs back, streamlining in freefall to catch up to the tumbling artifact ahead. It’s what he’s best at, reacting under pressure. The glass shatters from the cockpit as he meets his mark, and the shards suspend impossibly in time, his reflection shimmering a thousand times over. Fragments, he thinks. 

One of them is clad in all black. She gets closer and closer, before rocketing out of the glass like it’s a portal. They tumble into the pelican, or at least he does. She’s never out of step, never off her game. He watches as she leaps out of the back, jet pack discarded. 

She should have died. “That was interesting,” he says. 

  
  
  
  


“Hey, wait up,” Theta says, jogging up to him. He double takes, noticing his armor is purple and green instead of, but then, he thinks that’s right. “Listen, I heard you had a meeting with the internals--” 

“Oh, you did?” he says, looking theta up and down warily. The kid’s too young to deal with most of this, he tries to keep him out of it as much as possible. Somehow he’s still always underfoot. 

Theta taps his arm like someone else he knows might. “Yeah you mind if i ask you what it was about?” Theta says, then fidgets with his hands nervously in a way that he thinks, matches his personality. 

He turns away, “Hm, Not really supposed to talk about that,” he sighs, “I think it’s time for you to head to bed anyway.” 

“Ugh, you’re the only one who will talk to me,” Theta says.

“Yeah and I’d like to keep it that way, Sit tight,” He says, and leaves Theta behind before shifting to another memory. The bright tropical sun shimmers with heat and humidity. This isn’t the right memory either. 

“Knock knock,” Gamma’s voice comes in from his left, and for once he’s in armor, which is weird. Definitely something going on with the wardrobe today. 

“Yeah I wasn’t looking for you. I swear to god you’re the part of us who turned senile first,” he says, continuing through the thought, hearing a distant,  _ “Senile, Who???” _

“Do we have a problem?” Omega confronts him from across the pelican. He tosses the broken jetpack aside, black armor missing it’s usually midnight purple sheen. “I could fix it for you, just watch,” He says, voice reverbing up a pitch, too much like 

He holds his hand up to stop him. “No, and stop doing that I hate when you mimic her. I’m looking for Delta!”

As if summoned on command he looks to the right and there he his, shielding behind their shared cover. “You rang?”

“Ye-What the hell is up with the gold armor? Did I miss a memo about color swapping or am I losing my mind for good this time?” 

Delta looks up at him matter of factly and says “Do you really want me to answer that because we can run the probabilities. They’ll be high.”

“No-Just. Did you get it? Please tell me you got it. I swear to god If I have to return the wrong result again I. I donno what I’m gonna do. Probably pick up the debris of another personality’s what. Please tell me we can end this suffering for good this time,” He says, and thankfully Delta produces a data card. 

“Decoded and sorted, all ready to go,” Delta says. 

“Oh thank god,” he says, and claps the top of his helmet to pull him close in a hug. He takes the card and tucks it away in his armor “Don’t tell the others, but you’re my favorite.”

  
  
  
  


When the Director visits, Wash’s not exactly awake, but for once he’s not dreaming. Reminiscing maybe. A little more guided than the normal ragdoll through the friction between two minds. He doesn’t have a perfect picture of what happened yet but it’s enough to draw some conclusions, he thinks. Epsilon’s mood is a stain overlaid on his thoughts as usual, and it hasn't improved. Wash is pretty sure a decent amount of that melancholy is still his though. It’s hard to realize years of your life were a hard fought crusade for the ultimate torture of what he knows now is at least a derivative of a human mind. He wonders if Epsilon can catch hints of Wash’s pity, wonders if his contribution to that cause or his belated regret for doing so are half the reason why the AI hates him so much. Guessing by who he’s derived from, Wash thinks Epsilon probably isn’t one for apologies. 

He doesn’t notice at first, when exactly the Director enters the room, but the swish of his poly leather suit is just different enough that he knows the person sitting across from him is not a tech or a nurse. It’s possible it’s Price, but for some reason that doesn’t seem likely unless Wash actually wakes responsively. Which hasn’t happened for a while. 

Wash figures, he’ll wait until he decides to talk, and see if he needs to make any move toward actual consciousness. For someone who’s been sleeping for god knows how long, Wash is fucking exhausted, and can’t be bothered. It’s a considerable amount of time, and he’s halfway immersed in another memory of hip height sweetgrass and crawdads when it finally happens. 

There’s a deep inhale, and then “What are we going to do with you, Wash.”

And just like that, the two minds snap to attention. Wash makes a point not to breathe any harder, though he’s almost positive the monitor will catch his heart rate tic up a notch. 

The director must be watching them, or is deep in his own memories somewhere, because he doesn’t immediately follow that up with anything. They breathe into the silence and It’s its own kind of non-verbal communication, being in the same space at the same time. It carries weight, this kind of silence, and Wash gets the impression that this is the most like Leonard that the Director’s ever been around an agent. The feeling is too intimate. Like there’s someone else who deserves this moment more than he does. 

“I never blame a soldier for choosing their battles poorly,” the Director says contemplative. “Tenacity and endurability are honorable traits, ones that with experience may lead to better results than selectivity. I had thought that this would be the case for you, but. When all’s said and done, sacrifice is just another prerequisite for progress.

“I had high hopes for Epsilon. If ever any of our fragments showed great promise It was our latest product. The capability to recall every event and trait that led to its inception. An intelligence that could manifest as any one of it’s memorialized counterparts, or as an entirely new personality altogether. Endless potential, it’s embarrassing to have it relegated to a psych ward.”

He shifts in his seat, the plastic wheel base creaking. “Regardless, It’s becoming more apparent that urgency will cut this experiment of yours, Wash, short. Your teammates have been making the success of our study very difficult. So much so that soon precautions may be enacted to prevent further deterioration of our program. It may be imperative to put this particular experiment on hold, should that be the case. We can no longer tolerate improper use of resources,” he says, then breathes in with finality, “Or failure.”

Wash can feel Epsilon seething with hatred and betrayal. Matches it with some of his own. Has to bite his tongue to prevent them from saying something they’ll both regret. It’s another minute or so before the Director takes his leave, With a muttered word of ‘ for shame’ and the soft click of the lock. Wash flutters his eyes open to an empty room, save for the overflowing disillusionment of the moment. 

_ Inception, more like forceful shredding of my consciousness one piece at a time,  _ Epsilon storms at the base of their neck.  _ Fucking prick, I can’t believe we used to be the same person.  _

_ You are very dissimilar,  _ Wash observes the outburst like a wake in his own choppy water, not totally unaffected by the Director’s conclusion that he’s a failure. Wonders to himself if the director really thinks in such pedantic language all the time, or if the man is just as crass as his artificial counterpart underneath all that veneer. 

_ Shut up, I didn’t ask you.  _

_ You didn’t have to, but considering how much you’ve both been through even since the start of this program the differences make sense,  _ Wash mentally shrugs. He’s much more concerned about the end of the monologue.  _ What do you think he means by ‘put our experiment on hold?’ _

__ Epsilon pauses, but Wash can tell by the way the world tips there’s more than anger in the hesitation.  _ He’s never going to let me go.  _

__ Wash doesn’t really want to follow up on that, but doesn’t want to let the conversation die either. Their mutual distrust of the director has them talking at greater lengths than they have in more time than Wash cares to acknowledge, so he finishes the thought for the AI.  _ He’s never going to let you go from the experiment. Doesn’t that contradict what he said? _

__ _ Storage just means more tests,  _ Epsilon says, and he thinks about pain and failure and unbearable pressure. The kind of stress that stretches a subject beyond its limits, the kind of stress that bends awareness and warps it around corners, creases it into different shapes, pulls until they shear. He used to be afraid at the loss of time, the dark patches where he stopped being, until the gaps between recall were all he was. That lens widened over time, and he became aware of every event, every version of himself until they were each coaxed away entirely.  _ You think our internal disagreements are bad, try being the catch all for your other personalities bullshit _ Epsilon says, intonation amplified by the forced humor, covering for the terror underneath.  _ The director doesn’t have limits on how much he’ll make us suffer and I would rather die than start that all over again.  _

__ Wash stares at the rings on the pipe above his head and tries to remember who he is. Whoever came up with the idea that show don’t tell is the most effective communication clearly hadn’t experienced secondhand dissociation. Wash can’t say he’s a fan, reaches for something he knows, his birthdate, his first assignment, his team. Shies away from the feeling that he can’t prove there’s not someone else beneath the surface, that there won’t come a time when he won’t be able to explain the gaps in the day as the result of sedatives, that the deep unsettling feeling that he’s been separated from the core of who he is and may never make it back is just a new normal and not a deviation.  _ I am me, I am me, I am me  _ He grinds his teeth and thinks in the mental equivalent of holding his hands over his ears.

_ So was I,  _ Epsilon thinks.

  
  
  
  


He dreams about dry wind and sandy sage, the way the sun used to turn the sky orange at twilight over the treeless mountains and reflects in the Columbia river, just in time for him to drive home from fixing irrigation circles. It was his summer job in high school. The song on the radio is familiar, and the windows are down.

“It’s nice,” Leonard says from the passenger seat. 

“It wasn’t all bad,” He says, adjusting to reach across the stick shift for a pack of gum. 

“Was it worth it?” Leonard asks, watching him with scrutiny. “Leaving it all behind to fight a war?”

He pauses, fishing the gum out of it’s wrapper with one hand. A line of windbreak cottonwoods flashes through the sun to the left. 

“I hope so.”

  
  
  
  


Wash wakes up to pain. Most times he regains consciousness it’s not uncommon to have a bit of a headache, but this takes the word headache, gives it a bitch slap and sends it home to its mother. Migraine doesn’t describe it. Between the spikes of fire radiating from the base of his head Wash can hear his heartbeat racing in his ears, and realizes he’s in the middle of a cold sweat. 

_ Epsilon what the hell!  _ He tries to reach out to the AI but can’t break through the barrier of activity from his implant.  _ Talk to me, what’s happening?  _ He tries again but is met again with unresponsive shocks of radiating pain like lightning. 

Wash blinks sweat from his eyes and realizes that’s not going to work. “Help!” He says, but it comes out like a croak. He can’t remember the last time he spoke to a person. That thought is overwhelmed by another spike of ice and energy and then he realizes he’s screaming. If his hands were free his head would be in them. Instead he can’t help but struggle against the restraints, unable to register he can’t use them for relief. The door flies open as a nurse enters, his face an expression of shock and open question. “My head,” is all Wash is able to say before the next wave hits, and his vision spots out to white. 

The next thing he sees is a team of doctors working at speed, checking his monitors and administering treatment via his iv. They ask him questions but he can’t understand what they’re saying, the words just don’t make sense. He starts to shake his head but the motion nearly makes him vomit and he stops. When he opens his eyes again the doctor he was talking to is gone, replaced by humid white sky and broad magnolia leaves. To his left is the heart rate monitor, and the row of medical drawers. He looks back into the sky. Thinks,  _ Fuck, I’m hallucinating.  _ Though he’s shared many memories between them they’ve never been indistinguishable from reality like this, he thinks,  _ this is bad _ . Another wave of violent agony and damage hits and he thinks,  _ I might be dying.  _

__ He realizes the sky isn’t hot and humid anymore, but frigid and blue. There’s snow on the ground and it's cold enough to feel it through the thermal coils in his suit. Or maybe not. He can’t tell if he’s real anymore, if he’s totally honest, trying to look down doesn’t reveal his legs or the rest of his body so who’s to say exactly. He’s brought back to present by a strangled cry over the radio he may or may not have, followed by another in quick succession. 

“This is it,” Church says with finality, from his spot cowering behind a boulder. “Here she comes.”

He watches as soldiers across the canyon apparently get their asses handed to them by an invisible enemy. One after another, they try to shoot something they can’t see, and when that fails, hit something they can’t hurt. At the final soldier, the enemy reveals herself, clad in black armor, only to reach through the recruit's visor, rip out the dude’s skull, and beat him to death with it. 

In the quiet that follows she stops, and towers over Church. 

“Hey Tex,” Church says. 

“This isn’t how it went the first time, is it,” She says.

“Jimmy’s skull was pretty accurate but no,” Church sighs, “It isn’t.”

She looks him up and down. “You sure you want to do this? Even with,” she looks to the right, right through where Wash is sure he isn’t. 

“Acceptable losses,” Church finishes. “I can’t think of another way out. I have to.”

Tex nods with a little Hmm. “I’m not gonna do it,” she says. 

“Oh come on. I had it all planned out. You can’t let me have a little poetic justice?”

“This isn’t just,” she says, “and I think you know that.”

“Ugh,” Church growls. “Fine, I’ve always got to do everything my fucking self,” he says, cocking his pistol and jamming it up under his helmet. “I hate you,” he says.

“No, you don’t,” She says.

He hesitates. “You’re right, I don’t.”

The bullet goes through the top of his helmet and Wash 

  
  


There’s a loud ringing he’s sure is his ears from the gunshot, but 

“Patient’s heart has stopped, preparing defibrillator,” 

“Charged, Clear,”

“Clear!” 

“First charge ineffective, clear for second attempt,”

“Clear!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey if you want I have a writing playlist which cannibalized some old 8 tracks as well as picks of my own -- [ I'll keep adding to it as we get further into the story. ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5O3yNzR764cwFPxExEkd8J?si=0xHjnwdVRAa1DxUqZdS2pg)
> 
> My tumblr is here: [Waiting for Wings ](http://alexharrier.tumblr.com/)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What happened with Epsilon was not your fault Washington. We have safeguards for the unstable emotional patterns for an artificial intelligence. Sometimes these safeguards fail.”
> 
> “Oh, so it’s your fault.”
> 
> “We prefer to think of it as no one’s fault.”

Wash opens his eyes. He looks around the room like he’s seeing it for the first time. It’s a hospital room, and he has the sinking suspicion that this isn’t the first time he’s seen it. He closes his eyes. 

He feels fucking terrible. 

Somewhere to his left a machine beeps, and almost like it’s a signal a nurse comes in shortly afterward. They walk close to his side, and pull a chart from it’s hook on the wall only to make some notes. Wash peeks with one eye, catches hers when she looks up from writing. 

A sad smile spreads across her face “Welcome to the land of the living,” She says. 

“Am I,” he nearly whispers. His voice is hoarse. 

“Alive?” she says, going back to his chart. “Luckily, yes. Let’s try to keep it that way.”

His nose itches and he tries to lift his arm to scratch it, but is stopped by the straps holding his arms to his bed. Wash narrows his eyes at them like they personally offended him. And yet, something about them is familiar. 

“Can I scratch my nose,” he mutters, and the nurse looks up at him again. 

“Oh,” she says, looking uncomfortable. “I have to be authorized to release your restraints. Dr. Price should be in to conduct your evaluation shortly. Do… you want me to scratch it for you?”

He breaths in a sigh and says, “no it’s fine, I can just.” He bends his head down and awkwardly rubs half his face with his shoulder. “Got it.”

“Sorry,” She says, and Wash shrugs. He closes his eyes while she finishes her notes. She’s about to leave the room after replacing his chart when the door swings open again and another doctor enters, startling him from the light dose. 

“Oh good, he’s awake,” The Doctor says and then turns to his coworker. “We’ll need to move him to the recovery bay. Asap.” 

“What? He hasn’t even been given a security release screening yet,” the nurse says.

“Consider this a release then. The order comes from the top, so we better get him prepped and sent out,” He says, and then The doctor turns on his heel and leaves the room. 

She follows him into the hall, and Wash hears her call after him, “But he hasn’t even had solid food! Has the Director lost his mind?”

There’s not a reply, and shortly she comes back in with another aid. Wash watches as they release the buckles from the straps, pays attention to the look of concern on his nurse’s face, waits patiently as they detach the heart rate monitor and iv. He rubs his arms where they’d chafed when he’s free. The nurses clean up a few more things, push the machines to the wall and lower the bars on his bed before standing back. 

“Do you think you can stand?” She asks, and he looks between them, knowing something about this is very wrong. 

“Guess we’ll find out,” he says. It takes him a bit to untangle from the sheets, and the cold floor on his bare feet sends shivers up his aching spine. But he doesn’t pass out when he finally makes his way to vertical, only sways a little with the first couple of steps. He shrugs again, says, “Seems fine.”

The aids look at each other with an uncertain note of finality before they lead him from the room.

The short walk down the hall to a pre surgical room where his clothes and armor are stored makes him start to question his previous self assessment. His head aches, pounds at the base of his neck with every step, which is almost enough to distract himself from just how bone weary he feels. He doesn’t show it though, keeps his back straight, ignores how the hospital gown must look. 

The nurse offers to help him dress, but he declines. Wash kinda remembers coming here before his first insertion, but trying for more details than that is like running into a brick wall, impressions and shadows of thought that slip through his fingers. Things will be better once he’s with the team, and he tries not to think about how his hands shake while zipping up the under suit, how the way the doctors are acting should make him feel something, upset, worried, reluctant, but instead there’s just nothing. He focuses on the moment, thinks, it’s just how he acts under pressure, sits after putting his helmet on and doesn’t remember falling asleep.

He comes to the next time much more groggy, like coming up out of a hangover, guttural moaning, threatening nausea and all. But this time, he’s met by someone he thinks he really, really missed. 

“There you are,” North says, reaching a hand to help Wash sit up, “Slowly, slowly.” 

“How long have I been out?” Wash says, holding on to his head, which takes the gentle motion like whiplash. 

“Only a few days this time, they said,” North says, looking over his shoulder at the door that leads to the rest of the hospital wing. 

“This time?” Wash asks, thinks that can’t be right. Or is it? The wall between him and the time before waking up stays impenetrable. 

“Yep. After they removed it. It’s gone,” he says, and squeezes Wash’s shoulder. “They’re gonna remove all of them. Starting with you.”

“Yeah, Thanks Asshole,” South chimes in. “The whole project’s on hold now.”

All of them. Wash tries to think back to what he remembers before his insertion, with only slightly less difficulty. Something else went wrong, echoes of cries over the radio, and a name that used to mean nothing but now

Carolina had two. She was the insertion before him. 

“What about Carolina,” He says, and leans forward to try to look around the twins, but they’re the only two here. 

“Carolina’s had it, kinda rough,” North says, looking away into the middle distance. He seems hesitant to continue but says “The Director’s considering sending her out to hunt down Texas.”

“Hunt her down?” Wash repeats. Now this is definitely not making any sense. 

“She went rogue,” South cuts in, impatient. “Broke out of the facility to save her precious AI. Little later we found Wyoming. Apparently she tried to steal _his_ AI unit. Tried to steal his equipment too,” she says, bitter. 

“That hasn’t been proven,” North says, sending his sister a scolding look. “Besides that doesn’t sound like her,” he adds, almost to convince himself. 

“How would you know?” South says. 

“Just trust me, I know,” He says, Sounding more confident. Wash is struck by an inexplicable sense of skepticism, like it’s impossible that North could actually know. But when he tries to think of what he’s supposed to know, he only feels more confused. He shakes his head, trying to catch up to the conversation. 

“-She’s not a fucking monster,” South is saying, like north is an idiot.

Wash cuts into whatever that’s about to slow them down. “Stop. You guys are giving me a headache,” he says. 

North looks at him apologetically, like he forgot that Wash was there. “Once they find Texas, they’ll bring her back,” he says.

Suddenly the security breach alarm starts blaring, the lights dimming to red and back to white. 

“Or she’ll come back on her own,” North shrugs. 

“Why the fuck would she set off the alarm?” South says.

North looks toward the doors that lead to the bridge. “Who wants to bet it was York,” He says. 

“York?” Wash cuts in again, feeling completely lost. “Did he go rogue too?”

North looks back to him with an air of sadness. “You missed a lot,” He says, “But it’ll have to wait.” Then he draws his pistol, and he and his sister head toward the door. 

“Wait,” Wash says, swings his legs down and starts to follow. “I’m coming with you.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” North says and turns, backs Wash into a recovery bed where he sits by necessity. “You have to stay here, Wash. Doctor’s orders,” He says, and then turns and points at South. “You make sure he stays here.”

“What!” she says, as he jogs past her. “You can’t just leave me here to babysit!” but the protest doesn’t stop North. He’s out the door before she can finish. She turns on Wash with fists clenched, and he can feel her glare through both their visors. 

“I’m not happy about it either,” Wash says, embarrassed. 

She looks like she’s about to hit him, but instead she says, “You leave here I’ll break both your legs.” And then she’s gone. 

Yeah, that tracks. 

Wash lets out a sigh of frustration and lays back. So much for a reunion. At some point the alarm resets and his headache gets a lot more manageable. 

It isn’t long before he starts to feel the tremors of a battle happening somewhere through the walls. He sits up, looks around. There’s still no medical staff to be seen. Technically they discharged him, and no one’s making him stay here. On the other hand, he doesn’t think a fight right now sounds like a good idea. On the other other hand, sitting around and having no idea what’s happening is gonna drive him crazy. 

Wash gets up. He makes his way out to the corridors that feed between the barracks, the Freelancer personal quarters, and the locker rooms, finding them eerily deserted. All hands on deck it seems. If things really are going down, he’d be a lot more comfortable armed at least. He opens the door to the locker room like he expects it to explode. 

It’s empty, but shows signs of an altercation. One of the lockers has been ripped off the wall and several are hanging open loose. It doesn’t take Wash very long to find someone’s pistol that’s been left behind. He checks the mag and finds it mostly full. It’ll do until he can stop by the armory. 

He hears shifting metal from somewhere behind him and jumps behind a corner into the showers. Someone scuffles around for a second, then Wash hears them head out into the hall. He follows them just in time to see white armor turning a corner aft of the ship. 

Wyoming. 

Wondering where he could be going in a hurry Wash follows behind his teammate cautiously, keeping his distance. It’s about halfway past cargo that things get a little more interesting as the artificial gravity disengages. Wash flails for a moment, reeling in the resurgence of his vertigo before he can activate the simulated gravity in his boots. It doesn’t make his head completely clear, and he’s momentarily grateful his stomach is empty, before continuing to tail the agent. 

Only problem is he lost his target. He looks left and right when the corridor comes to a T. “Where did you go, Reginald,” Wash says, trying to remember the direction of the ship's wings. He’s close to the pelican hangar, but has never approached it from this direction before. He also knows that the rest of cargo and the brig are somewhere aft, as well as escape shuttles. The ship tremors with another distant explosion. He makes a right. 

Within a few turns he’s crossed the threshold to the brig. Wash realizes that the odds that Wyoming is here are low, but thinks he can at least ask someone for directions, the brig has to be manned. He’s proven right when three guards jump out of an open office to correct weightlessly against the wall, and raise their weapons. 

“You can’t be here,” the one on point says, “We’re on lockdown until the traitors are captured.”

Wash holds up his hands in surrender. “I’m only looking for the shuttle bay,” he says, “I was following an agent I think’s gone rogue and got turned around.”

“Right,” the guard says, she doesn’t sound convinced. “You sure that agent ain't you?”

“What?” Wash says, takes a step back, realizes he might have miscalculated. “You know I think maybe I saw a directory in the hallway, I’ll just go check that.”

“Stop right there!” she says and fires a round over his shoulder. Wash reacts by giving a fake and diving into an open office. “You’re not going anywhere!” he hears, and realizes frantically he’d just boxed himself in. 

He has no interest in firing on his crew, and so looks for creative alternatives. It’s a break room, so he grabs the floating coffee pot and a chair. He backs against the wall left of the door, and waits for the soldiers to make their move. 

They clear the door two at a time, and Wash springs his trap. He splashes the guard nearest him with the scalding coffee, following up by swinging the chair into their chest, catapulting them back out the door like a rag doll. The second guard fires two rounds before Wash can get a hold of his wrist, using a scissor grip to knock the magnum away before launching the guy into the cupboards with a side kick. He wastes no time leaping back into the booking hallway using the free floating chair as a shield. 

The lead has three more members of security stationed in front of the exit, with more gathering while he takes stock. Wash thinks he must have been an idiot to think this was a good idea, and hopes there’s a second way out of here. He shoves the chair into the blockade sending them scattering, and uses the force of the kick to fly down the hall toward the cell block. 

As he heads through the blast doors, the walls shudder again with stress, but this time the quakeing continues. Tex must be bringing the whole damn ship down. Wash urgently looks for a place to take cover. Unfortunately options seem pretty limited, he runs down a row of detention cells to the exit at the end. Before he can reach it the door opens behind him and gunfire rains down after him. He takes a leap into an open cell, hoping he can froggit his way out of here. 

Instead, the stress on the ship intensifies, and Wash is flipped around inside the cell like a ping pong ball. He tries to get a grip on the cot to brace, but his fingers slip and he’s thrown against the wall with enough force to black out. 

  
  
  
  


He opens his eyes to an eerily silent brig, a pounding migraine, and gravity. Real gravity. The ship obviously isn’t properly docked, because he’d slid across the tilted floor into the wall, which he uses to coax himself up. 

Looks like in the crash the cell’s plexiglass door emergency engaged, and someone’s rifle got caught in the bottom edge, leaving just a couple inches of clearance. Wash gives a half-hearted attempt at lifting it but he’s not any kind of ox even when he doesn’t feel like complete shit so is unsurprised when that does nothing. 

He hears someone open the door to the cell block and charge up the line in a hurry. Wash hides out of sight, until a familiar gold soldier flashes past his cell. 

“York?!” he says, trying to see out past the edge of his cell. There’s a scuffle and then footsteps as the soldier changes direction and comes back into view. 

“Wash!” York says. 

They regard each other like the other must not be real. Wash doesn’t know how to ask where he was when he woke up in recovery, or, as it seems more important at the moment, how he could have turned traitor to their program. So instead he says nothing.

There’s a distant clatter back the way York came, and they both look in the direction of the noise. Then there’s a green flash over York’s shoulder and delta says “We have less than two minutes before they breach that door.”

Wash recoils involuntarily from the AI, almost like he’s been physically hit. He backs into the lowest wall of the cell and shakes uncontrollably, like the ship is suddenly rocking beneath him, even though he knows it’s not. It’s just Delta, he thinks, he’s just small and speaks like a geometric proof, but any reassurance he can come up with doesn’t stop his limbs from trembling. 

York puts a hand on the glass and then looks around the edge of the door. “How do we get him out of here D?” 

“The controls for each cell are remote, they require contact with someone via radio to disengage the lock. Going back to infiltrate it ourselves will likely cost us our escape.” 

“We can’t just leave him here!” York says, attempts to lift the door himself with about as much success as Wash. “There has to be another way.”

Wash looks away, pulse pounding in his ears, breath caught in his throat, ashamed. He can’t bring himself any closer to the door. Can’t explain why his body has betrayed him to primal terror, and he sinks slowly to his knees in defeat. 

“There is not. And according to my assessment of his suit's vitals, Agent Washington is in no condition to run. York,” Delta says, “We do not have any other options.”

York looks at the AI wordlessly, deflates and lets his hand drop from the glass. Grips something in his other hand that Wash can’t see. Then perks up. He reaches around his hip and pulls something from a utility pocket. Slides a small paper under the door. 

“Come find me,” he says, “‘Kay Wash?” Then he shoots one last look up the way he came before taking off in the other direction. 

It isn’t until the sound of his boots have faded, and the security team rush past his cell completely before Wash can peel himself off the wall. He reaches for the paper, unfolds it and sees himself, and his team. It’s a photograph from the bar after their first successful mission. 

Wash leans back against the wall, waiting for his shivering to stop, and wonders where everything went so wrong. 

  
  
  
  


Counselor Price is the one who finds Wash in his cell. It’s been a couple hours since the ship made landfall and Wash has curled himself up on the cot. He isn’t asleep however, in the time since watching York escape Wash’s body hasn’t stopped shivering, and he’s fairly confident at this point it’s not a shock to the system. He counts his racing heartbeat and holds onto his photo, hoping it will end. 

“Agent Washington,” the counselor says, and the security door disengages. 

Wash doesn’t turn to see him. “Counselor,” he says, and closes his eyes as another tremor climbs his spine. 

“I’m sure you have a good explanation as to how you ended up here. It’s time we returned you to the recovery ward,” Price says, and Wash laughs bitterly. As if he could have voluntarily left his cell at any point. “Do you need assistance walking?”

Wash isn’t sure. He pushes himself up, and the world spins like a top. “Maybe,” he answers, making no move to stand. Instead he holds himself and shakes. “What the hell is wrong with me?” he asks. 

“It’s likely you’re experiencing symptoms of withdrawal,” Price says, and Wash wonders if it could be from an AI or if the counselor is referring to a drug induced condition. He tries again to push back against the fog in his mind but gets nothing. “We need to get you back in for treatment,” The counselor says, and Wash nods in agreement. A couple of guards enter and lift him by the shoulders, and he lets them lead him back to the medical bay. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey if you want I have a writing playlist which cannibalized some old 8 tracks as well as picks of my own -- [ I'll keep adding to it as we get further into the story. ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5O3yNzR764cwFPxExEkd8J?si=0xHjnwdVRAa1DxUqZdS2pg)
> 
> My tumblr is here: [Waiting for Wings ](http://alexharrier.tumblr.com/)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Epsilon? Epsilon went insane and killed itself inside his head. And from what I heard from the other recruits, he went nuts himself. Weren't you certified article twelve after that? Unfit For Duty.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UM still a mature rated fic. tags have been updated appropriately.

The doctors explain that he needs to complete a tapering dose regimen to safely detox from the barbiturates they’d been treating him with, and offer him a small cocktail in which he can recognize a few pain medications and more he can’t. It’s made very clear that if he doesn’t strictly follow guidelines his withdrawal symptoms will worsen, and may prove fatal. 

Wash doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t ask how the hell he’d developed a dependency in the blank space between insertion and recovery, doesn’t think about how much he needs the way the world softens around the edges. Instead, he falls into a deep sleep. He dreams, vivid and consuming in ways that he only remembers by how tired he feels at waking. 

For a while he stays in his recovery bed, just trying to understand why it feels so familiar. 

The nurses are typically reserved, they are required to ask him a diagnostic with each check up. It’s understandable, it can be kinda hard to start a conversation following “have you had any thoughts about ending your life”. The first time he’s given a meal the aid brings in the tray loaded with a small cup of simple rice meal, some applesauce and an orange juice. 

“My juice,” Wash says, but can’t figure out what he means, grasps vaguely at the distant sound of bottles dropping to the ground. It makes him inexplicably sad. 

“I tried to get grape but they were out at the commissary,” the aid says as she sets it down on his bedside stand. 

“Orange is fine,” he says, and pops the lid on it first to take a sip. 

For such a small meal he’s surprised when he’s full before he can finish the rice. And then disgusted when he has to use the bathroom to throw half of it up an hour later. 

“Fuck,” he says into the bowl and the reality of recovery sets in. 

The next time he’s awake and feeling social (not exactly the norm as it stands, Wash thinks resentfully, when struggling with a surprise dependency of which side effects include depression and anxiety) he stops the nurse before she can leave. 

“When can I see visitors?” he asks and watches the way she looks out the door to the desk at the nurses station. 

“It’s required that visitation be postponed until after completion of your detox,” She says, expression wary, “to ensure that your dosage is correct. Once you’re clean you’ll have to bring it up with Dr. Price.”

Price. Wash grits his teeth at the counselor’s name like a bitter aftertaste. “Oh,” He says, turns up his manners to an obstinate degree, “I’ll be sure to do that.”

When he’s alone he starts to think about how odd it was he was discharged without even a word about post treatment. The amount of supervision and rest he requires is above and beyond any kind of outpatient therapy, and Wash can’t figure out how he was supposed to know that without someone like Price making it very clear. 

Unless Wash wasn’t supposed to know. 

He sits up. What if he wasn’t supposed to know. The order to release him came from the Director. He doesn’t often make miscalculations of that kind of magnitude. Not without a reason anyway. So either he had a really good reason, or the facts that Wash could have died in a fire fight and then spent several hours spiraling into physical symptoms of withdrawal wasn’t a miscalculation. 

He closes his eyes and shakes his head against the fog and the sharpness of the thought. Conspiracy theory, he corrects himself. Call it what it is. Paranoia is just another symptom after all, he has no business to draw connections where there might not be any. Besides, if the Director had wanted him dead he has no doubt it would have happened already. 

And yet. And yet he can’t shake the suspicion he’s right. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Day five of detox is when he peaks. 

He can barely get out of bed, even to use the bathroom. Some of his early symptoms reappear, periodic cold spells and trembling fingers, along with an elevated heart rate. If it were just that though, maybe it would be bearable, Wash thinks. In reality withdrawal is worse than the sum of its’ parts, it leaves it’s subject more indisposed than a case of the flu or a bad hangover because it illustrates just how badly you need something that ultimately prolongs how shitty you feel. Biochemically, his brain cannot stop craving it. Wash knows that what they’ve been giving him is the reason he feels this way, but also that in another circumstance he would stop at nothing to get more of it. 

Needless to say, he’s a little tense with the staff. 

Wash had requested a few days prior for some reading material, and ended up with a collection of oddities, including a textbook of Discrete Mechanics, a dog eared copy of The Covenant Explained, and an old frayed retype of The Great Gatsby. It’s not like on day five he can read a single word out of any one of them, but holding a book in the fetal position and pretending almost counts as a distraction. This is what he’s doing when his hands are caught in another spasm that spreads through his entire body, and he drops The Great Gatsby on the floor. 

“Dammit,” he mutters, curls into the blankets further, and waits for the shivering to subside. Wash debates with himself about leaving the book there, he can always reload with another, it's not like he knows what page he was on. “Counterpoint,” he says to himself, “The textbook is heavy enough to put my arm to sleep, and If I have to even look at the covenant explained again I will find a way to shoot my own brains out.”

It’s decided then. He braces himself, pulls himself closer to the edge of the bed, and leans half his body over for the book on the floor. The room spins like he’s a bitch in a rave. It takes a minute for him to find the book again, but then he nabs it, swings it up on the bed with one arm, and then uses the floor to push himself back up. In the process however, he nails his head on the bedside tray, right at the base where his empty implant node is. 

As if he wasn’t already in a world of pain his vision explodes with lights, and his ears ring to the point of agony. Wash freezes on the side of the bed with his hands wrapped around the back of his head and waits for the sensory overload to pass, unable to see or hear the room around him. 

Instead of slowly returning to normal however, as the ringing subsides Wash hears voices, immediately recognizable by tone, and he sees visions of faces, and yet he doesn’t know their names. A woman who speaks like the crack of a whip, young colleagues from base training in Fort Worth, an installation Wash has never stepped foot in. Memories that are soaked in sadness, and a sense of resentment and betrayal that consumes him. They live under his skin like they’ve always been a part of him, tied through temperature and taste and smell to places he’s never seen before and yet feel like his. He misses her. He hurts and can’t tell exactly who or where he is but he misses her. 

The feeling of hands pushing him upright pulls him out of the past like dredging a corpse out of the water. 

“Don’t Touch Me!” he says, and in a fit he pushes the nurses away, twisting out of their grip. Wash folds in on himself and tries to hold on to the sensation of summer sun on his skin and coarse fingers running gently through his hair. 

“We just want to make sure your head is okay,” one of them says patiently, waiting for him to lift his hands. 

It takes a minute as the memories fade through the throbbing ache in his head, but once it's lost Wash opens his eyes just enough to show his irritation. “I’m fine,” he says, and pulls his hands away for them to see, “I hit my head, but it’s fine.”

They investigate the area gently, check his eyes for a concussion, but find no lasting injury. Instead they check his chart and let him know they’ll be back with another painkiller. He doesn’t say thank you. 

While he waits he stares into the middle distance and repeats the faces and places behind his eyes, trying to recall anything from before the blank spot between himself and the past he never lived. The practice leaves him feeling frustrated, the impressions of isolation and companionship stay just beyond what he can picture, her name always just out of reach. 

  
  
  
  
  


That night he dreams in a conversation, between himself and the voice in his head. 

“This probably means I’m crazy,” he says, walking the corridor between the mess hall and the freelancer training wing. “That’s what they call people who talk to themselves.”

“Eh, being sane is overrated. It’s all relative anyway. Worry more about being a good person,” his voice says, and they visit his locker to pick up a change of clothes before heading for the gym. 

He stops in front of the mirror to look at his reflection. His eyes, normally dark, have a bright circle of blue outlining his pupils. 

“Did you have to go?” he says. “I know we aren’t friends but. I needed you.”

“It hurt too much,” his voice says. “You know that.”

Wash wakes suddenly, in a cold sweat. He reaches up to his throat searching for a cord, gasps at the phantom feeling of a noose. Even though there’s nothing there, his fingers don’t quite feel satisfied, and the soreness when he swallows is palpable. The realization makes its way out of the fog like his past served his consciousness with a cease and desist. Epsilon tried to kill him. Both of them, he closes his eyes and remembers the gut wrenching feeling of the first swing. So why, why does he feel so lonely? Why is his first reaction to feel sorry? Why does it feel like missing a step to reach out and feel nothing reach back?

He pulls on his hair to ground himself and stays awake until the lights brighten again at 0600.

  
  
  
  
  


It’s after lunch that his session with Price is scheduled, and despite his efforts Wash hasn’t been able to purposefully remember anything else about the days (was it only days? Dependency suggests longer), leading up to his untimely discharge from the infirmary. He debates to himself over his peas how forthcoming he should be about any of that, and despite his history with the program being for the most part ‘benevolent’ in the loosest of terms at least to it’s agents, Wash is wary. Even for an organization with controlled information, the apparent classification of Wash’s own health conditions beyond his clearance seems unscrupulous. Aren’t there like, HIPAA laws? Not to mention the super fun experience of amnesia surrounding his apparently lengthy assignment with an AI that was suicidal, which surely they documented, and still haven’t debriefed him for. 

Wash decides he won’t be the first one to blink. If they’re willing to be honest about Epsilon, so will he. But not before then. For now, He’ll play his semi legitimate amnesia card instead. 

And yeah, he knows this all sounds like a lot of paranoia. But is it really paranoia when there’s a lot of reasons to be paranoid? Just judging by where trusting blindly everything Project Freelancer has had to offer has gotten him, namely an addiction and a hole in his head, it might be healthy to practice a little caution.

Wash sighs. He’s heard the term ‘wise up’ before, and even had it applied to himself, but the actual process is incredibly draining.

The one comfort about being hospital bound is that Wash doesn’t have to go anywhere, Price gets to come to him. This also means no one way window, so probably no immediate presence of the Director, which as dumb as it is, makes him feel just a little bit more comfortable. The counselor enters the room alone and closes the door, choosing to sit in the physician’s chair across Wash’s bedside tray. The paltry way the little table imitates the regular examination room makes him think of a preschool parent teacher conference. He hopes this won’t be as condescending as that, but doesn’t have high expectations. 

“Counselor,” Wash says as he’s settling in.

“Agent Washington,” Price says, pulls out a pen for his notepad. “Let’s begin with the diagnostic,” He reads off the same list of questions Wash has been answering with every administered dose of medication. Wash decides to rate himself “very accurate” on the questions relative to his current symptoms of addiction, even though for the most part, his tremors have subsided again. Everything else still sucks. 

“Now that that’s out of the way,” the counselor says, flips to a second page and looks up at the Agent. “How are you feeling today?”

“Tired,” Wash says. “Sick.”

“Would you say that that is affecting your mood?”

Wash thinks about it, tries to put a name to the general emptiness that seems to be the only other accompanying aspect to needing something he can’t have. “Maybe I’m a little irritated.”

“I see. Tell me more about that.”

“I’m just ready to be out of a hospital bed. I want to be doing something that matters, with my team, not sitting here alone every day,” Wash says.

Price raises his eyebrows at the word team. Makes a note on his page.

“Where are they,” Wash asks, “when can I see them.”

“Not until after your detox schedule is complete. Let’s get back on subject,” He says, and Wash deflates with a flicker of resentment. “Have you had any further thoughts regarding your experience with the AI Epsilon?”

Wash lays his head back. “I told you, I don’t remember. I can kind of recall my first operation,” He says, which is true. He can accurately remember most of the procedure leading up to the insertion, but after the surgeons flipped the gravity off all he gets is impressions. A lot of fear, mostly. It doesn’t entice him to investigate further, especially with the narrow information his subconscious has already laid in his lap like a mangled carcass. “But not with any detail. After that, nothing until I was released prematurely.”

Price narrows his eyes, but says, “Which was unfortunate. The records show you were supposed to receive post operational instruction to remain in medical custody.”

Wash is sure they do. He doesn’t have anything to say in reply, there’s probably some defense underneath that about combating an insurrection and compensating for an attack on their crew, not to mention the whole crash landing thing, which led to a shortage of available medical personnel. Even though it deserves an investigation he’ll never get one. 

“How are repairs on the ship going anyway,” Wash says, like the jump in subject matter makes any sense. 

“They’re proceeding well,” Price says, and Wash notices the counselor’s defensiveness fades. “The UNSCs emergency response crew arrived three days ago, and repairs are well underway. We should be airborne within a week, as of the last update.”

“Oh good,” Wash says, and means it. Something about being a tactical sitting duck while also physically indisposed has had his sense of threat heightened. The doctors are nice and all but they don’t know much about what’s going on. He lets out a small yawn and says, “It’s nice to hear some positive news.”

“I’m sure,” Price says. He seems to make a decision, stacks his papers like he’s getting ready to leave. “Is there anything else that’s been on your mind?”

Wash hesitates, tries to decide if he’s allowed to ask the question he wants to ask. He thinks about the shadow of rage and grief and sorrow in his head that used to be alive. 

“Agent Washington?” Price asks, and Wash startles like a lot of time has passed. 

“What happened. To Epsilon,” He says quietly, “After he… was removed. Was he transferred to storage?”

Price sits back and regards him a moment. “The Epsilon unit was destroyed. Any logs regarding it’s functional data have been archived or purged,” He says. Wash only nods, knowing with the way the counselor watches him closely this isn’t an opportunity to push the envelope without showing his hand. 

The counselor leaves shortly thereafter, and Wash is left alone. 

  
  
  
  


As he progresses through his treatment the days start to pass a little quicker, each moment is spent less and less consumed with the thoughts that surround his chemical deficit, and he finds little ways to pass the time. The books help and weirdly enough, Discrete Mechanics isn’t so hard to parse. Something about that hints at an acquired appetite he wouldn’t have had before his insertion, and he tries not to think about the cause so much. He also goes on walks, just through the inpatient ward, as the nurses can’t let him go anywhere unsupervised and there are too few people for too many jobs these days. It's at least something, and helps break down the long period between doses and twice weekly visits from Price. 

Wash also starts remembering a lot more, in fits and spurts, mostly involuntarily and at innocent moments. Sometimes it’s as easy as a short impression, a moment of conversation between himself and the AI that he can consider and file away like any other thought. Others take him completely out of the moment, wash over him like tidal waves, the moments of intense feeling between two people in one head, or more names and places from Epsilon’s origin. These leave him with a deep feeling of otherness, in some cases feeling like he’s following his body around from five feet away, in other moments he feels like he’s the wrong shape or size, like he’s six inches too tall and much more athletic than he’s supposed to be. 

Some things are actually different. The first time his eyes catch on the scar in his eyebrow in the bathroom he stops and pokes at it for ten minutes. Wash tries to think back to how it happened, and struggles to place where it came from, until it snaps out of the fog like the IV line did and hits him as hard as the table cracked against his head the first time. He thinks there’s a testament to the level of care in that he’s scarred over something that in his opinion, should have healed easily. When he finds the thin line to the left of his sternum in the shower however, it feels right that the things he went through left at least some visible marks, to make up for everything else that can’t be seen.

It’s hard not to pull inside himself, shut down and hide away when the pieces of Epsilon bleed through the gaps in his memory. At the worst times, when he’s dissociating to the degree he’s no longer certain who he is, he does hide, crawls into bed, complains of stomach ache, tiredness, whatever symptoms he needs to be left alone. Wash learns to lie, puts on a mask of politeness and order that, even if it doesn’t match the geniality that used to set him apart, satisfies the staff who are looking for improvement. 

He wonders about his team, and how much they know. They each (save for South, and CT who’s MIA) had an AI. Wash thinks back and tries to remember if they’d had any side effects like his. Maine had headaches, North and York hardly ever slept, but none of them seemed to harbor the kind of information Wash’s remembering. Torture, namely, with a nice ribbon of Dissociative Identity Disorder. He wishes he could talk to them at least, they’d understand some of what he’s going through. After how all sources dismiss him when he’s brought the idea up however he decides to let it drop. He’ll see North and South soon enough anyway. Given that South doesn't break his legs first. 

When he’s weaned off the barbiturates completely The Great Gatsby is returned to the nurse who loaned it, and he spends the next five days of monitoring leafing through the textbook and wishing he had a way to document his intrusive memories. He doesn’t want to start a notebook until he’s sure he can keep it privately, but in the meantime he laments the little things that slip through his fingers that he could otherwise be processing. If he doesn’t pay close enough attention to his mental tangents he starts to lose track of which ones are native or not. 

As for his addiction, the first few days clean are hard again, not in any big or dramatic way but in the general edge applied to everything, and in how he knows that if he could just have another dose that would go away. Though he wishes sobering wasn't the appropriate adjective to use, It’s likely something that he’ll have a vulnerability for for the rest of his life.

By the time he’s scheduled for his final psych eval though he’s in high spirits. He even smiles at the nurse who performs the morning check in, says thank you to the aid who brings his lunch. Not many people cheat tragedy as many times as Wash has and make it out the other side, plus the prospect of being able to move about on his own again is at this point, the holy grail. He’s allowed to wear his uniform when Price meets him in an adjacent examination room and Wash can't help but tap his foot in excitement. 

“Agent Washington, you’re looking good today,” the counselor says. 

“Just excited to get out of here,” Wash says, hiding the edges of a nervous smile. 

“Let’s get started then,” Price says. They complete his recovery diagnostic in short order, the only anomaly Wash has to report is an “infrequently” for experiencing headaches or migraines. Once that’s done, Price nods and switches gears. He pulls out a thick manila folder from his work bag, and puts it on the desk between them. 

When the silence starts to drag, Wash says, “What’s that.” 

“This is the summation of your psychological profile,” Price says, “It’s the main topic of our discussion today.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Wash shakes his head at it and looks up at Price. “Wasn’t the point of this meeting conducting a final evaluation?”

The counselor raises his hands to clasp them on the table in front of him. “Agent Washington, while your current health status can be proof for your release from the infirmary, I’m afraid that the events and evaluations which have transpired are more than ample evidence against your ability to serve in an active capacity,” Price says. 

Wash feels like the floor is falling out from underneath him. “You’re Article Twelve-ing me?”

“The conditions of Amnesia and Dependency on their own are disqualifiers for military service. I cannot change the medical standards of our branch’s organization. I’m sorry,” He says. 

Wash breathes and plays the words back in his head, tries to make them make sense. Medical discharge. This was not how he thought this story was going to end. His eyes roam the sparse room looking for anything else to focus on, then instead land on the item between them. “So the folder. Is everything?” Wash says and reaches forward tentatively, pulls it toward himself when Price doesn’t stop him. 

“The summarization, conclusions of analysis and evaluations,” Price says. “Yes. It’s everything.”

His hands tremble as he opens the top, sees the cover letter for his discharge, and starts to flip through the pages. He recognizes the stacks of his recent diagnostics, charts of his medical information and dosage, digs back to the patchy parts he’s still remembering, unable to wait any longer. Finds an event log for a couple days before he woke up in recovery. He stops and scans the summary becoming more and more appalled with each word. _18:46_ _Patient began a systematic distress event, expressed extreme pain and unresponsiveness. Possible aphasia. Suffered seizures at 18:49, 19:02, and 19:11. Heart failure at 19:15. Recovered pulse via Defibrillation. Discovered failure of artificial implantation node, initiated surgical removal at 19:28. Administered the following medications for stabilization…_

“Excuse me, I died?” Wash looks up at Price, headache worsening, “was no one going to tell me that?”

“You were not clinically declared dead,” Price dodges.

“But my heart stopped,” Wash says. 

“Correct,” Price says. 

“I’m sorry, I’m having a difficult time right now seeing much of a difference,” Wash says. He looks at the date on the page, realizes that it was 34 days after his insertion. He had loosely charted out events based on the current date, but seeing it still kicks the air from his chest like a mule. More than a month spent suffering with another mind. He runs a hand through his hair.

“We should also talk about your trajectory for outpatient treatment, and plans for discharge. We will obviously accommodate your therapy while you remain onboard the Mother of Invention, and can connect you to a local officer in the UVA to make sure your recovery doesn’t have the opportunity to stall,” Price is saying, pauses to wait for the former agent to catch up. 

Wash takes a deep breath to steady himself. “What about everyone else,” He asks, closes the folder and looks up at Price. “North, South, Carolina, do they already know I’m out?”

Price blinks steadily and says “The Freelancers… have not been debriefed about your discharge.”

The intonation is weird enough that Wash decides it’s time to stop beating around the bush. “Because, I’m going to tell them? That seems inconsistent with protocol,” He says.

“Because they cannot at this point in time be debriefed.”

“Why,” Wash demands, now eyeing the counselor like a coiled snake, “Tell me why.”

Price takes a deep breath as if he’s bracing himself and says, “Because they’re gone. Save for North and South who left together, every active Freelancer left on our roster defected and scattered the day of the crash.”

Wash didn’t imagine this meeting could have possibly gotten worse, but his heart pounds with disbelief and he struggles to stay seated. “Even Carolina?” He asks.

“Agent Carolina was Killed In Action that day. By Agent Maine.”

Wash sits back stunned. He looks away, shakes his head, looks back at Price and knows he’s not lying. He tries to let the pieces land but can’t make them make sense, feels like his whole world was just shattered and yet also like one of his teammates might jump out and yell ‘punked’ at any moment. It’s not real. It can’t be real. But as Price forges ahead, outlining their projected schedule and when Wash will be officially sent home, Wash balks and puts his hand on the table. 

“I think we need to postpone this conversation to another time,” Wash says, and he stands.

“We haven’t finished your evaluation,” Price says.

“Yes we have. You already made your decision. As for the information regarding my discharge, find an opening in your schedule and send me the date and time. Or send me a letter. I’ll be in my quarters,” He says, and turns to the door.

“As an ex agent you’ll be required to change barracks,” Price says, stopping Wash in his tracks. “You’ll retire your armor and stay in fatigues.”

Wash looks at Price with the weight of a man in grief. “You really want to take everything from me?”

Price closes his mouth, reconsidering whatever he had to say. When he doesn’t say anything else, Wash pulls open the door. He says, “You’ll know where to find me,” and exits the room. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey if you want I have a writing playlist which cannibalized some old 8 tracks as well as picks of my own -- [ I'll keep adding to it as we get further into the story. ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5O3yNzR764cwFPxExEkd8J?si=0xHjnwdVRAa1DxUqZdS2pg)
> 
> My tumblr is here: [Waiting for Wings ](http://alexharrier.tumblr.com/)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How are you feeling? Are you up for this?”  
> “Say what you want to say Wash.”  
> “It's just that, Giving up your AI was a big deal. I thought maybe...”  
> “I’ll be fine. Worry about yourself. “

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a bit shorter but I really think I covered the ideas I wanted here, and pulling from the next section wouldn't have worked. so. 
> 
> I think going forward from today I will be updating every other week until I run out of buffer. Hopefully this will help me stay ahead of myself, but also life has been a little too real for me the last couple of weeks and it's been making writing this hard. I really want to get to the good parts though so I'm gonna keep trying!!!!

Wash stands in the open doorway of his bunk and stares at the empty space, the silence of the freelancer barrack echoing with the phantoms of his teammates behind him. The soft background noise of the ship creates auditory tricks that he can't help but startle at, returning now after almost two months away. If he listens hard enough he can hear North and York shuffling around in their pantry, or the creak of the wall as Maine rolls over in his bunk, or the whine of the shower as Carolina comes back from another session of sparring. Carolina. He grips York’s photo he’d retrieved from his armor, which he was required to leave behind in the infirmary, and waits for the emptiness to feel real. 

Instead, he’s filled with rage. It isn’t wild or incontrollable, but it’s a slow burn of anger that builds until he’s suffocating, builds until he can barely breathe in but for the fire of outrage for the injustice of it all that burns inside him. None of them deserved what happened to them, but least of all Carolina. When finally he can’t hold his fury inside any more he walks to his short desk, grabs the folding chair, and throws it into the hall with as much force as he can generate. 

He stands alone in the quiet that follows and gasps for air. The outburst worked, the fight his body wanted has gone out of him, but in its wake it leaves nothing behind. He expects any of the stages of grief, but the longer he waits for his mind to begin bargaining or for sorrow to wash over him the more unaffected he feels. Like somehow, he skipped all the way past acceptance and landed in a world where it had always been like this. 

“Oh my god what is wrong with me,” He says, and puts his head in his hands to think through his headache, “Why can’t I be sad? My team is gone and one of them is dead and I just found out  _ I _ fucking died. Why can’t I feel anything?” He waits. After a while the automated climate triggers the air conditioner, and he gives up standing by falling over onto his bunk. 

It’s probably Epsilon’s fault, he thinks. They spent so much time grieving together, It must have bankrupt Wash of all his emotion. Even though it’s a cheap shot there’s probably some amount of truth to the thought. Ruefully he relents, that’s not completely fair, he does have some emotion, just not in a consistent, functional, or reliable way. 

He stares at his ceiling and just lets it be. It’s only a matter of time before he’ll be evicted from this space anyway, and if in all honesty, he had a choice between spending it mourning or just being in it, he would probably choose the latter. So he listens to the walls, and his memories, and falls asleep a few hours later. 

  
  


The dream starts out normal. He’s in the kitchen preparing dinner, waiting for her to get home from base, and watching from the kitchen window as his daughter and the neighbor kids play in the field, tiptoeing the bank of the pond to pick cattails and then sparring with each other. With a smile, he turns away and gets focused on the glaze, and it’s not until he needs to flip the steaks that he realizes that his wild redhead is up in one of the willows dangling from a branch precariously over the water. He should probably go tell her to get down. 

The branch snaps before he can reach the shore. He breaks into a sprint as she falls about fifteen feet, snapping willows on the way down before belly flopping into the water with a painful crack. It’s a few seconds before he can reach the water, scattering children and diving for the small form that’s thrashing through weeds to reach the surface. 

“Hey! I got you, breathe!” he says, lifting her above his shoulders out of the chest high water. She struggles coughing up the lake and he brushes away her bangs. He holds her close while she gasps, “‘Lina, breathe! There you go. What were you thinking? You could have drowned!”

The child squirms in his grasp, pushes away as they reach the bank. “Let me go! I was just proving a point, dad, I’m fine.”

“Was the point about surface tension, because I don’t think that needed a practical demonstration using your face,” He says, forcing down the tone of anxious laughter before it can get out of hand, and while he lets her down he holds onto her hand. She starts to twist in petulant embarrassment. 

“Hey,” he says, tone suddenly serious. She quiets, face turned away and he kneels down to her level. “What did I say about taking risks?”

She doesn’t answer but turns to listen, looks up at him through her wet hair with those green eyes. 

“Only take risks if they pay off,” He says. She nods, and looks away. “Swallowing half the lake isn’t a payoff. Just like gettin’ killed by your mom isn’t a payoff either. We should get you cleaned up before she gets home and murders us both,” he says. Then he grabs her and pretends to eat her and she squeals before running away in laughter. He’s reminded there’s still a gang of neighbor kids and says, “Who wants a popsicle? Seems like a near death popsicle time.”

The kids follow after his daughter up the hill to the house after that, crisis forgotten. She waits for him at the top, fiery and fearless. “I’m queen of the lake!” she says, holding up a lilypad that got caught in her clothes while the other kids cheer, and for the life of him he just can’t stay mad. 

He grabs her head in a faux noogie for another hug. “You are the epitome of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he says, and this time she hugs him back, and smiles up like the moon and the stars. 

  
  
  
  
  


Wash rolls off the bed, coming to in the chaos of falling, flailing through sheets in a failed attempt to catch himself before he hits the floor. Once there however, he lays his smarting head down on the ground and holds back tears, thinking about the girl with red hair and green eyes. 

It’s difficult to separate himself from these memories, even outside the dream the love Leonard had for his daughter spreads through his chest like it’s his own. He feels a fresh wave of anger and then grief, knowing now about who the Director and Carolina used to be. Obviously he doesn’t have the whole picture, but Wash can’t help but feel indignation over the calculated lengths to which the Director has resorted to reach his goals. Even ignoring the very specific outrage of pitting a woman against an artificial recreation of the Alpha’s idealized girlfriend in a competitive war, or outfitting her with tortured fragmented remains of her father’s copied consciousness, in the end Project Freelancer killed his own daughter. Bitterly Wash wonders if the payoff was worth the risks they took. Somehow he doubts he’ll ever receive an answer to that question. 

Wearily, he pushes himself up, scrubs his face, and checks the clock, which reads 04:38. It’s close enough to morning, so he decides to get up for real. For a minute he wanders around in the vacant Freelancer quarters before deciding it’s too empty, and instead changes into some workout shorts. If he’s going back into the standard barracks he’ll have to get used to a standard schedule anyhow, plus a run might help him shake the lingering dissociation from the dream.

The track kicks his ass. Two months off isn’t exactly the greatest boost for his training, and add to that the fact that he was not relaxing but languishing in a hospital bed for most of that and he’s grateful to be running before the crew’s wake up call. He calls it quits after two miles, just in time to pass the first recruits arriving for their Physical Training. No one looks at him twice, the benefit he guesses from spending most of his time on board with his helmet on. 

By the time he showers and wanders back into his bunk it’s almost 07:00, and because he’s not eager to socialize, and also, not particularly hungry, he sits on the cot and stares around at his room. 

There’s not a lot in it. Wash didn’t bring anything with him from his past, so what he has he’s accumulated over the years in the military. There are little things though, the stripes and badges he’s earned he keeps in a small box on his desk, having not needed to add them to his uniform for a couple years. Not a lot of time for ceremony, it turns out, in Project Freelancer. He also has a few more trinkets: some bottlecaps, a notepad that he only ever left passing details on, a pocket knife North had given him for one birthday. He opens the drawer and starts to sift through the papers inside. There’s a few letters of summons in here, meetings he’s long since gone to, but also some odds and ends from his teammates, an old napkin with a drawing by Wyoming of Maine bench pressing Carolina, a message from CT he found in his cot on christmas. He finds a stack of receipts, meals and tabs he footed for the team under the assumption they’d pay him back. Most of these are still outstanding. He sits back looking through them frowning at the IOU’s, foolishness souring the taste in his mouth. In the end he was just the patsy, wasn’t he. 

It’s not like he didn’t know that things always landed in his lap like this. For the most part he thinks he truly believed that people are generally good, that no matter their mistakes ultimately everyone tries to do the right thing, or at least, he hoped. Maybe that was stupid. Sure seems like it, standing in the abandoned mess of Project Freelancer. 

He crumples them all up, and throws them in the trash. Then he pulls an old book box out from the storage shelf above his cot, and starts emptying his desk into it. Letters, pens, nicknacks, awards, all of it. Once it’s bare, he kicks the box in where the chair goes, and goes to see if he can find anything left in their miniature kitchen. He has to rinse the coffee pot out, but there’s plenty of grounds left in York’s stash to steal, so he makes a breakfast of some stale cheerios and black coffee, since all the milk is very bad. It’s around the bottom of the bowl that he hears the main entrance open. 

Wash listens to the sound of several boots coming up the corridor but makes no move to stand. Two officer cadets enter their break room and stand at attention, they’re followed by a Captain who stands in front of Wash with authority. Prior to knowledge of his discharge, Wash outranked him, but he returns the Captain’s salute anyway. 

“Mr. Webb, I am Captain Fagan,” He says, and shakes Wash’s hand, and then gives him an envelope. “I’ve been given instruction that you’ll be reassigned to my company. I’m here to give you your letter assignment, and also to assist in your transfer. Officers Maggs and Weaver will be able to help you gather your things.”

“It’s Wash,” He says, “and I appreciate it but that won’t be necessary I can grab everything myself--”

“Nonsense,” Fagan says, cutting him off, “Extra hands make for light work. I’ll need you to report in at 12:00, and they’ll make sure you don’t get lost.”

Wash sighs, resigned. “Of course. Just one thing,” He says, “I’m under the impression I’m in some kind of temporary limbo until the orders of my discharge can be carried out. What does that mean for my assignment? I can’t report in for duty, so what will I be doing?”

The Captain looks him up and down, if wash doesn’t know better he’d say the man looks apprehensive. “Don’t worry about that, we’ll find work for you to do. Just let your CO’s figure it out. Men.” 

He makes his exit and the younger officers remain where they are, though they ease out of attention. Wash eyes them warily, he had hoped he had more time to just decompress, but that’s not like the military. He’s lucky he supposes, that he had the night to himself before Price sent the dogs to come force him out of his hole. He pours out the rest of the coffee, gestures to the waiting officers, and says “It’s this way.”

Since he has them he makes them do all the work. He shows them where his duffles are stored, and sets them to work putting his wardrobe and desk inside. Then he circles back to the rest of the bunks to search for anything that might still be his. He comes up with the New York bottle opener he loaned York, and an old neck pillow he teased South with after one 14 hour mission in a pelican. He’ll probably need it if he’s going stateside, commercial flights are horrendous. He finds an empty palm sized leatherbound notebook he’d bought CT, decides she won’t be using it so he may as well. 

He pauses outside Carolina’s bunk, stares inside like it’s a mausoleum. Carolina was always the hardest one to reach, though God knows he tried. Somehow York of all people managed to find his way into the space between Carolina and the rest of them, that vulnerable layer underneath her hard shell where she kept her love and fear. In the end though, York ran away, and left her behind. Wash clenches his fists as he thinks about it though, it doesn’t make any sense. If only he could get his hands on some records of the crash, maybe he can figure out what went wrong. 

In the present, he takes a deep breath and crosses the threshold. It holds a reverence that he breaks, poking through her bunk. None of this belongs to him, but some things pull at the edge of his mind, references to memories just out of reach. When he pulls open her desk drawer it’s nearly empty, but something rolls around in the back. He reaches in and pulls out a small glass unicorn, and is hit with the crawling sensation of hair raising up his arms and a short flashback, the feeling of standing in line at the bookstore when a hand pulls at his sleeve. She shows him a unicorn, just like so many other figures she already has, and he remembers asking, “Another one?” before caving and getting it anyway. Wash rubs his forehead and studies the rearing horse, incredulous but somehow, it fits. He wishes he could ask what made this one different to her than all the others. 

Wash knows that wanting someone doesn’t make them his, but standing alone in their deserted quarters it seems unlikely that anyone who was closer to her will ever see it, will ever look through and make sure the special things were kept, especially if the Director hasn’t done it yet. So Wash keeps it, not for himself, but so that someone will. For Carolina. 

When the officers have finished, He makes one last trip through to make sure he hasn’t forgotten anything, and then he follows the officers out the door, leaving the Freelancer wing behind. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know Wash’s name isn’t fully revealed as far as I remember in the video canon, but the surname Webb is actually one detail from RVB apocryphal text that i do like. One of my favorite book series growing up was the Bourne Trilogy, and sharing the surname (full name, actually) with Jason, another TBI defined character who’s recovery is self achieved through completing his mission, just seems right. I don’t know for sure if that’s where they got it from but I see the connection, Burnie.
> 
> Hey if you want I have a writing playlist which cannibalized some old 8 tracks as well as picks of my own -- [ I'll keep adding to it as we get further into the story. ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5O3yNzR764cwFPxExEkd8J?si=0xHjnwdVRAa1DxUqZdS2pg)
> 
> My tumblr is here: [Waiting for Wings ](http://alexharrier.tumblr.com/)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You ever notice every time you open your mouth you make things worse?”  
> “...sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and with this chapter I release him into the wild

The news must have spread. 

This time as he walks the halls outside the sanctuary of the Freelancer’s quarters, soldiers begin to take notice. Conversations stop in the halls, groups of eyes follow him past doorways and corners, Wash even thinks he catches a private point at him in his peripheral vision. It’s uncomfortable. He holds himself tall regardless, even if they’re looking for a show there’s no point in giving them one. It’s been a while since he’s walked the hall without armor, and he’s reminded again just how much Spartan class soldiers stand out from the rest even in fatigues. There is not a single person who’s taller than him. A few would meet his eye--Wash was never the outlier of height percentiles--but it makes him miss Maine, and North, but then again, he doesn’t need to look up to them anymore, in any sense of the word.

They put half of his gear into storage, the duffel with his desk items and plain clothes gets shoved on top of a stack of bags the same shape and color, each marked with personalized tags, in a large storage unit in a back hall behind the barrack. Then he’s shown to his bunk, they’re tighter packed than his previous quarters, with no personal space. Bunks are separated into sub-rooms of four beds, a left and right, top and bottom bunk. Officer Weaver drops wash’s second duffel and points at one of the top bunks, “This is you,” He says. “Wish we had an open NCO room but things have been tight for Officers since the crash.”

Wash looks up at it and thinks, that’s going to be super fun to fall out of. “Great,” He says devoid of emotion, then turns to the Cadets, “I think I can take it from here.”

Officer Maggs nods, stands back into the aisle between the bunks and says “Captain Fagan’s office is just the third door up the hall on the right, when you exit. We can wait to show you or--,”

“That’s okay, really,” Wash says, tries to give them a reassuring smile that says ‘I’m not gonna bolt’, waving them off. “Go get yourselves some lunch.”

They wait unsure for a moment, but then they look at each other and seem to decide that the objective has been delivered. There’s still a moment of hesitation though, and Wash watches the indecision in Weaver’s stance before finally he raises his hand to salute and says “Thank you. For your service.”

Wash returns the gesture, and then is left to himself. Indignantly he bores a hole through the space the cadets leave, he hasn’t even been officially dismissed from duty yet and soldiers are already thanking him. Wash feels so fucking tired. He shakes his head to snap out of it and unpacks his wardrobe into his assigned drawers in the wall with more force than strictly necessary, and throws his mostly empty duffel in the open shelf above his bed. 

When he reports into the Captain's office, Fagan hasn’t returned yet from a meeting, so Wash waits on a bench outside. Luckily for him though it’s only a few minutes before the man who interrupted his morning appears up the hall. The Captain welcomes Wash into his office, who sits in one of the vacant chairs across the desk. 

The meeting is cordial. Captain Fagan explains that Wash is looking at three to four weeks at the earliest of being formally released, based on the schedule of operations and their trajectory back toward command. It may be possible for him to catch a ride earthbound on a shipment vehicle, but again with the Mother of Invention having just completed a supply port post-repairs, It will likely be longer until another order is filled. 

Until then, since he’s passed his physical exams as required for discharge from the infirmary, and Fagan’s been given custody, the Captain sees no reason not to integrate the former Freelancer into daily operations as normal. He’ll attend formation, PT, meals, showers, training as usual with his assigned squad. He’ll have a standard military post, and a job. It’s a little awkward as Wash’s rank normally would participate more in leadership operations, and his previous occupation was alongside Connie in comms, so when it’s suggested he help out in the Captain’s office as a glorified secretary he’s not exactly thrilled. Unfortunately since the Freelancer program’s mass defection, the entire station has been sanctioned from all Mission Command positions, so any hope he had of doing something more focused is shot dead on the spot. Resigned, he accepts the position, and his subjection to the military attitude of ‘hurry up and wait’.

So, He attends his first shift, learning from his colleague Second Lieutenant Georges what responsibilities he’ll perform. For the most part, it seems he’s entirely clerical, a schedule monkey for the four Captains in the office, and when the Lieutenant needs the help, a data entry processor. Fine by him. The less he has to talk to anyone or be visible anywhere the better. The job is mindless but in some ways, being exhausted from just leaving the hospital and all the AI bullshit he’s hiding just beneath the surface, that’s a benefit. He can stamp dates on forms all day long.

At dinner time he’s finally hungry so he bites the bullet and makes his way over to the commissary. Word has definitely spread by now. Between the time it takes to push open the door and find his place in the back of line a majority of the soldiers have shot at least a passing glance his way, if not full out staring, which a couple guys a short distance ahead in line are doing. Wash doesn’t make eye contact. He has nothing to be ashamed of, he knows that, but this much attention was uncomfortable even when he was completing missions and considered a minor celebrity. Now, there’s a certain amount of sizing-up happening with each look, like these men are still trying to decide if he’s a veteran or an enemy. He fills his tray and pays for the meal, then, instead of even pausing to debate sitting among the rank and file or the officers, takes his food with him out the door and leaves the whole dilemma behind entirely. 

He eats dinner in the empty break room in his office. It’s fine. The spaghetti suggests a PT test might be coming up, but Wash hasn’t checked so he doesn't know. It’s not something he’s worried about anymore, the looming consequences of trainings and certifications hold no power over him when his service has an expiration date. 

After eating he cleans the tray off in the sink and hides it under his desk, to be used again tomorrow. Then he stalls, uncertain what to do with the rest of the night. On a normal evening, he might rope North, York, and Wyoming into a game of poker, or South’d snag the rec room and they’d watch reality TV and take bets on how often hosts touch their forehead, or he’d pretend to train and keep track of Carolina and Maine’s sets. Now though, there’s nowhere for him to go. There’s no one for him to follow around. 

He lets himself wander the halls, looks for the unused maintenance ways where people won’t bother him, and ends up on a balcony of the cargo hangar. Quietly he watches as the shift changes and workers perform routine maintenance on the pelicans, finding a spot between beams to sit. After a while he pulls out the notebook he swiped from CT’s desk, and starts to write down the things in his head that he’s identified that Epsilon left behind. Carefully though, and in code phrases he’ll remember. Most of the time what he gets are memories, but on occasion more important details of the AI or Project Freelancer sneak through, commands for specific functions, or pass-codes, or mission details. He isn’t the greatest code maker but mixing things up as an altered journal while inserting details under a shifted alphanumeric key will have to do. Then, when it’s about 20 minutes to lights out, he makes his way back to the barracks to change and climbs into his bunk before the squad returns from their night, like he’d been there all along. 

  
  
  


The barrack’s wake up call shocks him out of sleep with a flair of bugle. It takes the length of the song to piece together where he is and how he got there, details mingling with the lingering narrative of his dream. It was about reporting to basic, but instead of a predictable test dream where an officer shouts his head off, every soldier he tried to talk to kept disappearing. His family was in it too, but they didn’t have faces. Trying to find those details now while listening to Reveille play over the speaker he’s unnerved to find he can’t picture them accurately, and features that come to mind like his father’s green eyes are wrong. It’s in the middle of this spiral that someone pokes him from below, and Wash jumps with a physical jolt.

“Whoa shit, he is awake,” one of his bunk mates says in reaction, amidst suppressed laughter. 

“You are gonna lose that finger,” another says, before there’s a sound of feigned hurt and a hushed, ‘he’s not a fuckin' jaguar,’ the first says “Time to get up sleepyhead, formation time.”

Wash looks over his shoulder blearily at the group, and the sign of life gets them to back off. When there’s enough space to climb down he pulls on his uniform. Regrettably he laments that there weren’t any available officer’s quarters, but at the same time. It’s not like constantly examining what the AI did to him is exactly helpful. Even if his squad is a bunch of undecorated yahoos, having the distraction could keep him productive. Living by himself at this point sounds about as appealing as it doesn’t. Soon it won’t make a difference anyway. 

Formation is a relic of the past he didn’t honestly think he’d be doing again any time soon. Not that the Freelancers didn’t have their amount of discipline, but the near religious dogmatic rituals of military life were often forgone in the name of efficiency. Honestly there’s probably something in that that should be a red flag about the priorities of the program, and the strength of it’s union with the rest of the UNSC. For a man whose whole life has been dedicated to this military organization, the Director sure doesn’t seem to have a lot of reverence for the UNSC when it comes right down to it. However, contempt doesn’t quite hit the right tone for the relationship either, Wash thinks.

The words of the pledge roll right off his tongue though, as if not a day has passed. The squad motto he doesn’t even try to recite, listens to hear what it is first so he won’t look like a clown whenever it’s needed. Once the flags have been raised (on a ship he thinks sardonically, where there is no breeze) they are released to finish preparing for the day. 

It’s during PT that trouble arises. They report to the track for a two mile run, and a circuit of calisthenics. It isn’t terribly hard for Wash to stay near the head of the pack, and the more he pushes himself the less he has to think, which translates to less time he spends trying to dissect his own thoughts into Wash and Epsilon. By the end of it he only feels a little nauseated, which, considering it’s day two post hospital bed Wash takes that as a positive. Then they start the calisthenics by splitting into teams while timed. There’s a moment while he’s spotting his partner’s sit ups that he feels the sideways shift into memory as it happens, tries to stay in the moment but can’t help the way time elongates and he’s suddenly someone else, somewhere else, teamed up in a race to complete their physical training test. He was not very good at it to be totally honest, and his constant banter probably didn’t help. 

“Hey, uh, Webb,” 

“Dude I think he’s fucking broken,”

“Um, it’s your turn,”

Wash drags his way back into the present, blinking away the past, feeling frustrated. It couldn’t even be for anything important? He focuses, looking up at the face in front of him, and says “It’s Wash. Use Wash or don’t use anything at all.”

“But,” the soldier looks at him like he must be confused. “Your patch says Webb. You’re not an agent anymore.”

Wash looks down at the patch sewn on his fatigues, rips it off and puts it in his pocket. “Yeah. So?” he says, then he switches places with the soldier like he’d not frozen at all and starts his set. They don’t argue with him, but a few other soldiers watching put their heads together, having finished while he was lost in Epsilon’s past. He ignores them. They can say what they like. 

“Is there a problem over here?” the drill Sergeant says, coming over to investigate. “What’s the tea party for? Y'all standin' around trading gossip while the rest of us are workin' huh?”

The spectators break up with mumbled no sirs, but the Sergeant isn’t satisfied. 

“Come on, I want to know what’s so juicy you gotta flap your mouths together. Huh. What is it?” He says. 

By this point Wash has finished the set so he stands and addresses the Sergeant. “It’s my fault sir. I got sidetracked and we got behind,” he says, hoping they can all just move on. 

The officer looks around the group sizing them up, then at Wash. “Two laps,” he says, looking Wash in the eye. “If you’ve got time to kill you got time to run.”

There’s a muffled groan, and the sergeant adds “In addition to the rest of the sets! Hurry up!”

If the sergeant was looking to prove a point, he isn’t making Wash any friends. Without another word he pushes off for the track. By the time they’re all wrapped up with PT there’s a coalition burning glares in Wash’s back. 

“I can’t believe they gave us the worst Freelancer.”

“How can you tell he’s the worst?”

“He’s the only one left, what do you think.”

“Nah, he was the last on the leader board I heard,”

“I don’t think it matters, Freelancers are worse than pigs, bunch of traitors.”

Wash stops in his tracks, turns, bears down on the group until he’s toe to toe with the last one to speak. “Do you know what rank I am? Answer the question,” he says.

“Um, none?” the corporal has the balls, Wash has to admit. 

“I’m equivalent to an E-8, a Master Sergeant. Agent assignment was in addition to that,” He says, and notices with some satisfaction the soldier swallows. “I’ve led men, fought in theaters outside the scope of this ship. As did every other member of that program. No matter their current choices, the service they rendered deserves respect. Do I make myself clear?”

They nod, sufficiently quelled. Satisfied, Wash leaves them in the hallway to deal with the piss in their pants. 

  
  
  
  


Captain Fagan is a bit of a stickler for rules, so even though Wash is on paper a quasi civilian he is required to follow all the regulations as would any soldier, including regularly cutting his hair. Thus, he reports to the barber after dinner and stands in line with the rest of the privates like its boot camp and he should be holding his only two sets of clothes for the next eight weeks. When it's his turn he steps up to the open chair and sits himself down. Before the lieutenant can go down on his head though he catches his eyes in the mirror and says, "leave some on the top."

The officer gives him a double take, seems confused by the request. "You want me to, not cut the top?" he says.

"Not all of it," Wash says, "leave a couple inches." 

He looks side to side at the other barbers, who give him looks but don't provide any input. He leans forward like he's gonna whisper in his ear and says "but that's not, regulation."

"And I'm not an agent, I don’t currently hold a title, and I'm in the process of discharge," Wash says, matter of fact. "I don't see what the problem is."

The lieutenant nods, hesitates for a moment before he decides to let it go. Wash retains a feeling of tension until the officer changes to a longer guard and does his best to keep the volume. He even does a decent fade. Satisfied Wash leaves a tip and leaves without another word. 

  
  
  
  
  


It isn’t until lights out that he’s able to settle and think about the day. Lying in his bunk, he still can’t shake his rising discomfort when he tries to picture his family again. He can remember general things about them, like height, weight, hair color, but their faces are details that he can’t picture, at all. It’s true that he could use a computer tomorrow and look up their social media profiles, but he should be able to remember. He can picture other faces, the people that Leonard knew keep trying to come to mind, but even his teammates he can picture, members of the medical staff too, so it’s not a blanket condition. The harder he tries however, the more frustrated he gets. It’s almost like Epsilon tore through his mind like a plasma cannon melting away core parts of Wash’s history, not unlike the way Wash watched the cement and metal crater in on itself on the rooftop of the Charon Skyscraper. He admittedly feels resentment toward the AI for that, but maybe more so toward Price and the Director, who have never hesitated to sacrifice their own to target their goals. He used to think that dedication to their missions was admirable, but now thinks it might be more describable as reprehensible.

Wash rolls over in his bunk, scraping the edges. The added irritation of barely fitting makes it nearly impossible to sleep so instead he climbs down quietly and goes for a walk. 

His feet lead him to the perimeter of the ship, to an observation deck not far from the artillery stations. He looks at his reflection in the plated glass, finds the faint scar before changing focus, searching for connections between the distant stars. There’s no way to reverse the damage Freelancer bestowed him with, all the ways in which he is no longer who he was before his insertion, and he knows that. Considering his return to civilian life fills him with dread, a deepening sense of unknown about reconciling who he’s become with who he used to be. There’s no denying he’s different after his insertion, but compared to the young man who first enlisted… there’s reasons Wash feels disconnected from his own name. Facing those facts in the context of his home awakens a new sense of fear. How can they possibly understand what happened to him? He leans against the railing and lets out a gust of air. 

At the same time, the righteous indignation he has for the burnt out remains of his psyche demands retribution. The now familiar fire of anger flares up again as he watches the distant star field, frustration kindled by his own powerlessness to do anything about it. Wash wants there to be an easy answer, for an obvious right and wrong and a council to exact judicial prejudice. If only it were that simple. It’s possible that there’s a review in progress beyond what he can see after their crash into a remote planet, but he doesn’t have much faith that without some kind of whistle blower with proof of the actions committed by Project Freelancer that it will ever amount to much. Certainly not for him, if he’s sent home before it’s completed. If there’s even an investigation in progress.

He shakes his head and walks a few more paces. He must be crazy if he thinks he can take down the Director, stripped of titles and clearance, where if he shows his hand he’ll be dead before he can reach for the pot. Who else is there though. If not for himself, shouldn’t the ruined lives and death of his teammates be motivation enough?

It keeps him awake, turning his conflicting desires over and over so that when the lights brighten again he has to rush to return to post before someone notices he’s missing. 

  
  
  
  
  


By lunch Wash still doesn’t have a solid answer. Managing the schedule in the Captain’s office isn’t difficult, so he had more than enough time to scroll through pictures from home and think about the alienation and the fury he’s harboring. He makes his way through the chow line and is about to perform his routine bolt for a dark corner of the ship when a group of soldiers stop him in his tracks. Recognizing some of the soldiers from his squad, the biggest steps forward and crosses his arms over his chest, meeting Wash eye to eye. 

“Where’re you going in a hurry?” he says, a confrontation disguised with warmth.

Wash looks at this soldier, Identifies his name and insignia as Williams, a Sergeant First Class, one of the few higher ranked enlistees. The man appears to mean business so Wash says “Do we have a problem?”

“We might. The boys and I are beginning to think you don’t like us,” He says, with a touch more intimidation that Wash feels is strictly necessary. “I want to know why that is. Why don’t you stay and eat?”

Wash grinds his teeth but relents to the group, turns to the empty table to his right and places his tray down purposefully. He sits all while watching the SFC, opens his hands once settled with a question,‘happy?’. 

The soldier walks around the table, but doesn’t sit down and join him. Wash rolls his eyes and starts eating. He can feel the Officer’s table watching but they’re not required to intervene, and frankly in Wash’s experience Officers prefer to pit soldiers against each other in some misguided attempt to foster humility, so, they likely won’t be any help. Having been in fights before though, Wash has learned not to throw the first punch. Instead he takes his juice box and pokes it with the straw, only for the SFC to grab it from his hand. 

“Apple juice. Mind if I?” Williams says, and then proceeds to drink it while Wash watches. Despite himself Wash imagines taking the straw and shoving it down the man’s throat through his nostril. When the drink empties with a gurgle Williams crumples it in his hand and drops it in Wash’s salad. 

“What do you want,” Wash says, gripping his fork with too much tension. 

The soldier leans on the table and says, “For you to stop acting like you’re better than the rest of us. Fancy little agent, guess what. You’re not a teacher’s pet anymore. Your whole program turned out to be a farce, and I think someone needs to put you in your place.”

“And that’s you huh?” Wash says, he snorts and raises an eyebrow. “I’m so scared. What, are you going to eat my chips next?”

Williams straightens, looks indecisive now that Wash has called his bluff. There’s a moment when he turns away that Wash thinks it’s over, but then the cafeteria blurs with an audible smack as the man comes back with a left hook.

Wash stumbles out of his seat as soldiers all around them stand to close him in. He raises his guard and keeps Williams on his right, where his defense is strongest. The cafeteria erupts in shouts in support of his opponent, and Wash realizes he should have known that peer pressure was building, but none of the privates look ready to jump in and help. Mentally he shuts them out, and says to the soldier “What’s your problem?”

“You’re my problem,” Williams says, dropping all pretense of camaraderie. “I’m not about to accept a snake in my ranks. That bitch killed fifteen of my men!” he shouts, and then throws Wash’s tray at him before going in hot with fists targeting his left side. 

Wash uses his forearm to deflect the tray, and does his best to dodge, before following up with a round of uppercuts, catching the SFC on the chin. He misjudges the hit though, and Williams is able to get an arm around Wash’s shoulder to hold him for a couple knees to the chest. They break apart and circle again, Wash coughing and Williams spitting blood. 

Someone from the crowd throws a drink that clips Wash’s ear with a burst of gatorade and ice amidst vitriolic cheers. Williams uses the distraction to his advantage, launching Wash off his feet with a kick. He slides on the ground winded, but pulls his guard up as Williams comes in to rain down fists at his face. 

Playing the defense is not working to his advantage. It doesn’t seem like the MP’s are in a hurry, so either Wash lies down and takes this or he stops fucking around. He catches another hit against his temple, cracking his head against the floor in a burst of lights and pain and he makes his decision. 

Wash kicks out diagonally, breaking the Soldier’s stance, and then shoves from the opposite side rolling them over. Then he goes all in, one hit after another, seeing red. Blood erupts from Roger’s nose when he makes a direct hit, but Wash doesn’t stop wailing, having found an outlet for his rage he pours it out without mercy. Hands pull him off the Soldier from behind, shove him around, kicking and hitting before there’s a cacophony of whistles when the MP’s finally step in. 

The soldiers break apart, leaving a battered Wash and a bloody Williams in the middle of the floor. A chill rushes up Wash’s spine as he realizes the Soldier isn’t moving. He watches as medics run in and holds his breath while the MP pushes him toward the door. Finally Williams lifts his hand and sits up on his own, proving responsive, and Wash exhales in relief. They drag him out into the corridor telling him to get his head straight when a familiar voice says “I’ll take it from here,” and Wash turns to see Fagan. 

The Captain pulls him into his office and tells him to wait, then leaves for a few minutes before returning with Williams. His face is a little less bloody, but his nose needs all the gauze currently shoved up his left nostril. Wash does not smile, because that would be inappropriate. When Williams takes his seat in the second chair, they do not meet each other's eyes. 

“Does someone want to explain to me why the MP’s are cleaning blood off the floor in the cafeteria?” Captain Fagan says, looking quantifiably pissed. 

“Just a settling of debts sir,” Williams says, “Simple as that.”

Wash purses his lips but doesn’t say anything to that. 

“Really,” Fagan says, looking between them. “That true Wash?”

“I find it hard to settle a debt I was not complicit in, considering I was in the infirmary at the time,” He says. Even though that’s technically untrue, it’s close enough and complicating this with his bullshit won’t do him any favors.

Fagan looks back at Williams. “Sounds like you’ve got the wrong man. Regardless, neither of you should have resorted to violence to settle your differences, infighting like that bitch slap fest is far below both of your stations. If I see a shit show like that again there will be legal repercussions, but I think in this case... two weeks of latrine maintenance together should be a good alternative,” He says, pausing to give them both a look. “Dismissed.”

When they leave the office one after another Williams takes off without giving Wash a single glance. Wash returns to his desk, hungry and sore, feeling mutual contempt.

  
  
  
  
  


His first meeting with Price following up on his outpatient treatment is that afternoon. It’s impeccable timing, and Price’s eyes linger noticeably on the black eye blossoming from the fight. 

“Washington,” He says, making no move to comment on his appearance. Wash doesn’t provide context, it seems pretty self explanatory. They complete the diagnostic and Price folds his hands on the table. “Are we better prepared to speak about your future at this point?”

“What else is there to say. I’m stuck onboard until you can drop me off at command,” Wash says, lacking enthusiasm. 

“Unfortunate as that may seem it is the reality we are facing. Your profile has been submitted to the board for review of benefits. One positive note is that your file should be completed before our arrival, expediting the transfer of care.” Price says. He watches Wash carefully, which only serves to irritate him. 

“Great,” he says in monotone. “Sounds perfect.”

The counselor appears to consider something, then says, “I understand there was an... altercation this afternoon. Do you feel any need to talk about what happened?" 

“No,” Wash says matter of factly. 

Price nods, but pushes a little further. “Tensions being high can raise a lot of concerns, sometimes what’s said or done in heated arguments can stick with us,” he says. 

Wash raises an eyebrow, but thinks about those seconds of silence after the fight where Williams lay motionless on the ground. The absolute blind rage he surrendered to left more than an impression on him. Wash feels confident at this point that if he lets his discharge go through he’ll never forgive himself, or be able to satisfy that anger inside. He’ll take it out on whatever victims cross his path, for the rest of forever. So, somehow, he should do something about it. It’s as simple as that. 

He blinks and looks up at Price who is waiting for an answer. “Are we talking about the playground or the military?” He says, “We’re adults, insults and empty accusations don’t bother me. It’s not a big deal.”

“Very well,” Price says, and shifts in his seat. “Have you had any new thoughts regarding your time with the Epsilon AI?”

Wash tries not to narrow his eyes at Price’s use of the word new. “No, I haven’t. Just the same old headaches. Plus some new ones,” he says, gesturing frankly at his face. 

“I see. Well, is there anything else you feel you wish to discuss? These sessions can only be as productive as you make them,” Price says.

“No, I think I’m covered,” Wash says, keeping his face as neutral as possible, realizing that he’s passed the point where his trust extended to the counselor. When he exits the room it’s on a new path of recovery, one which he forges himself, and at the end of which lies the downfall of Project Freelancer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO some decisions were made. I always kinda placed Freelancer Wash as somewhere in his thirties, but in order to fit this rank he had to have been around at least 34 When appointed. He could have been promoted during his time at Freelancer, but since I’ve been vaguing I think they’re in the program for at least a few years (I mean at most five) this could put him between 34 and like 38 at this point, If I had to give him an age I’d go with 36. I chose the rank of Master Sergeant because they can work in coordination with Captains, don’t have to be in a current leadership position, and earn around 65k a year, a comparative wage for the two positions. For Wash's case, being an agent would be some sort of space command special forces, making his NCO rank perhaps slightly more prestigious in terms of accomplishments and time served (and pay) than a low ranking Captain. Lieutenants would be able to give him orders due to chain of command, but also they would absolutely fear him. Basing all of this over some of his conversations with Doc in season 8 about pay, the way he outranks Caboose’s captain in season 6 (WHICH as a side note It would make more sense to me if the simulation troopers ranks were also just that, Simulated but I DIGRESS), and the kinds of skills he has as an Agent in Freelancer, it seemed like the most appropriate choice, as an E-9 would require too many years of service and an E-7 is too low a rank to be considered strictly comparable to a Captain. I don’t have him trained as an officer, because we don’t see him specifically in leadership, leading lots of people (like 150 for a Captain), and it’s also never implied (until zero, but lmao that’s The Future). The most he may have led in these Enlisted ranks is likely around 25 soldiers, probably less if he spends most of his time as a higher NCO in Freelancer. All of this is really just speculative though since Who TF Knows How Rank Actually Works In The UNSC. Ultimately, Officers (Captains) are the ones up the chain of command from NCOs, so having an E-8 assigned to work as staff and still complete assignments as needed works with the narrative I started before I did all this research LMAO. While it would have been WAY easier to pull the “I outrank you” line and not specify his rank, I like challenges, and details make things fun, even If it has no other bearing on the plot and I am still second guessing the decision as of posting this. Anyone with experience in the armed forces is free to correct me on this, I did my best!
> 
> Hey if you want I have a writing playlist which cannibalized some old 8 tracks as well as picks of my own -- [ I'll keep adding to it as we get further into the story. ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5O3yNzR764cwFPxExEkd8J?si=0xHjnwdVRAa1DxUqZdS2pg)
> 
> My tumblr is here: [Waiting for Wings ](http://alexharrier.tumblr.com/)


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